Durability Testing Robot: Robutt, Rudy and ABB

When Nissan showed its door-closing robot in 2017, ExtremeTech noted that the average car is opened and closed 45,000 times over ten years. A durability testing robot packs that kind of use into weeks: it slams doors, sits on seats and repeats the same motion thousands of times. This post covers proving grounds and test rigs, Ford's Robutt and the door robots at Nissan and JLR, the humanoid robots now being worn out on treadmills, ABB cobots on appliance test lines, and what comes next for robot testing in factories and homes.

The door handle of a Range Rover Velar, 2017. Photo: 160SX / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

How proving grounds and test rigs wore products out

Durability testing grew up on proving grounds and in labs. Ford's You Yangs Proving Ground in Victoria, Australia, was established in 1965 and has been at the centre of the company's durability work there for more than 60 years; the current Ranger and Everest went through nearly two million kilometres of real-world durability testing. Furniture and home goods have their own labs. At IKEA's test lab in Älmhult, Sweden, someone used to drop in every half hour to check burning candles for soot and dripping wax, until the lab replaced those human checks with a camera.

GM's proving grounds at Milford, Michigan, seen from the air in 2015. Photo: Joanna Poe / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Test rigs took over much of the repetition. MTS Systems, founded in Minnesota in 1966, makes road simulators, load frames and hydraulic actuators to measure the performance and reliability of vehicles, and Ford still lists three-axis simulators alongside robotic drivers among its test tools. At the US National Bureau of Standards, engineers fitted a fatigue-testing machine with automatic stopping devices so that a test would halt when a crack began to form in the metal specimen. In its 2017 fiscal year IKEA's lab ran 15,500 tests with only 37 people, because specialized robots pressed weights onto chairs and couches and opened and closed doors.

A fatigue-testing machine at the US National Bureau of Standards, fitted with automatic stopping devices that react when a crack forms. Photo: National Institute of Standards and Technology via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Robot arms then took on jobs that need a body. Ford measured how real people get in and out of a car with pressure sensors and used the data to program a KUKA robot arm carrying a pad shaped like a large person's backside. This Robutt sat on the Fiesta's seat design 25,000 times, about ten years of use, in three weeks. In 2019 Ford Europe added sweat: about half a gallon of water and some 7,500 sits, bounces and twists to copy ten years of use in three days. Nissan's door robot, shown in 2017, slammed a Pathfinder's door 45,000 times.

A 2017 Nissan Pathfinder, the model whose door Nissan's door-closing robot slammed 45,000 times. Photo: Bull-Doser / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Door robots and humanoid stress tests in 2026

Door robots are still busy. At JLR's Gaydon Engineering Centre in Warwickshire, a robot named Rudy works in a climate chamber that can drop to minus 40 °C. Over Christmas 2024 it was set to open and close a Range Rover door more than 14,000 times, and its full programme packs a lifetime of door use, 84,000 shuts, into 12 weeks. "A door is the first attribute of a vehicle which a client engages with," said Thomas Love, JLR's component and system test manager.

A Range Rover Evoque, 2012. JLR's door robot Rudy opens and closes Range Rover doors in a climate chamber at Gaydon. Photo: OSX / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Robots now get the same treatment. In October 2026 Figure AI's chief executive Brett Adcock reported that a Figure 03 humanoid had walked for nine straight days on a treadmill, covering 348 miles (about 560 km) in 1.2 million steps, in a stress test meant to expose hardware failures. The robot ran on an external power cable. In May the company had kept Figure 03 robots sorting packages for about 200 hours, handling 249,560 packages. If humanoids are going into homes and factories, tests like these will become routine.

A Unitree G1 humanoid robot. Humanoids built for homes and factories now go through endurance tests of their own. Photo: Sayanesy / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

We found no dedicated ABB durability testing robot, though ABB cobots already run tests on production lines. At Electrolux's refrigerator plant in Curitiba, Brazil, ABB YuMi and GoFa cobots carry out gas leak detection and electrical testing, and ABB says they raised the productivity of testing operations by more than 68 percent. Electrolux first asked ABB in 2018 to automate the gas leak checks, and a YuMi replaced the manual verification. ABB says GoFa with its Ultra Accuracy option has over ten times the path accuracy of other cobots on the market and is aimed at precision quality checks in metrology.

An ABB YuMi cobot on the refrigerator test line at Electrolux in Curitiba, Brazil. Photo: ABB

Where durability testing robots go next

Over the next few years, more of the things in a home will arrive with robot-tested hours behind them. IKEA's lab expected up to 17,000 tests in its 2018 fiscal year, up from 15,500, and machines carry most of that load. Home robots add a new item to the list. Figure redesigned the hardware of Figure 03 for domestic tasks as well as commercial work, and a robot like that has to survive millions of steps and grips, which is what treadmill runs are meant to check. Car makers have also made their tests harsher, adding sweat to seat tests and deep cold to door tests.

A home kitchen full of appliances that were built and tested on factory lines. Photo: XanderL / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

ABB robots could take on more of this work, as a possibility. A seat test like Robutt needs a strong arm, and ABB's IRB 4600 is a general purpose robot with payloads up to 60 kg and reaches from 2.05 to 2.55 m, built for compact, high-density cells. For lighter cycles next to people, such as pressing buttons or opening appliance doors, ABB's GoFa cobots are designed to work alongside operators with force and speed limits. Test sequences like these are usually written and checked in RobotStudio before a robot touches a prototype.

Two camera-equipped ABB IRB 4600 robots around a gold Porsche 911 in the glass box outside the Porsche Museum, Stuttgart, 2017. Photo: ABB

The open problems are realism, cost and skills. A robot only finds the failures it is set up to cause, so Ford first measured real people with pressure sensors and later added sweat, and JLR runs its door tests in a cold chamber. Rigs and robots cost money, which is easier to justify for products sold in large numbers. Engineers also have to turn field data into test programs and read the results, and IKEA's lab shows how few people a large test programme can need. Robot drivers are a separate story, covered in our post on test driving robots.

An ABB GoFa CRB 15000 cobot at a test station on the Electrolux refrigerator line in Curitiba, with its FlexPendant on the left. Photo: ABB

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