Ford Hires Robots To Drive Trucks For Tests Too Difficult For Humans

OK, so maybe “hire,” was a bit of a stretch, but Ford has certainly enlisted the use of robots to drive trucks during testing regiments that are simply too rigorous for humans. Yikes, sounds like something from The Twilight Zone doesn’t it? But it’s absolutely true. Believe it or not, Ford still road tests all of its vehicles for reliability’s sake and in that realm there’s no replacement for logging thousands upon thousands of real miles, not computer simulated ones in a lab.

Years ago, human drivers would spend hours driving test vehicles through a menagerie of tests, some being extremely bumpy portions of road that were hard on the body when continually traversed for 12 hours at a time. Well, Ford got wise to the idea and created a semi-autonomous driving robot that uses GPS and plenty of other technology to keep a vehicle within an inch around a test track for hours at a time. It can even stop the testing in the event something (read: a Dear) jumps out in front of it.

For the full story follow the Yahoo link here. What’s next, a robotic replacement for Vaughn Gittin Jr.? As cool as robots are, we hope not!