Jaguar Land Rover has developed a unique technology that will help evaluate the resistance of vehicle paintwork to external influences, for example, to contact with the claws of pets, which are often transported in the cabin or luggage compartment.
The solution is called RoboYogi. The idea is to create an artificial dog paw with claws using 3D printing, which is then applied to individual body parts that are most often exposed to contact with pets. For example, during the development of RoboYogi, such an element was the rear bumper of a Land Rover Defender SUV.
The Labrador Yogi from the National Guide Dog Breeding Center helped with the project. He jumped in and out of the luggage compartment of a Land Rover Defender, and each action was recorded using special pressure calculation technology. This allowed the engineering team to obtain realistic data for RoboYogi: how an average-sized dog climbs into a car, and what pressure its claws and paw pads create.
At the next stage, Jaguar Land Rover specialists used 3D printing to create an exact copy of the Labrador's paw with a spring-based design. It reproduces the impact of a real dog's paw.
It is noted that the innovative and at the same time very unusual development is used by Jaguar Land Rover engineers as part of a standard abrasive wear test consisting of 5000 cycles. RoboYogi scratches the car's body ten times in random places and then on one specific side before repeating the entire process again. The results obtained serve to assess the quality of the paintwork.
Source: 3dnews.ru