Sonair ADAR, the 3D ultrasonic sensor designed to boost safety in spaces shared by humans and robots, will debut to North American audiences May 12 at Automate 2025.
Sonair, the Norwegian sensor firm behind the award-winning sensor, was selected from a crowded field of contenders to participate in the prestigious Automate Startup Challenge.
Knut Sandven, CEO, Sonair, said “Safety just got a lot simpler — and better adapted to detect people. ADAR enables 3D 360-degree obstacle detection around autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) at a significantly lower cost than the sensor packages used today, enabling AMR manufacturers to build safe and affordable autonomous robots.”
A typical 2D LiDAR safety scanner in an AMR only sees a person’s legs in one horizontal plane. In contrast, Sonair’s ADAR (acoustic detection and ranging) technology detects people and objects in 3D. A single ADAR sensor provides a full 180 x 180 field of view (FoV), and a 5 meters range, for the robot’s safety function.
The core technology behind ADAR has been in development at the world-renowned MiNaLab sensor and nanotechnology research center in Norway for more than twenty years. The imaging method is called beamforming; it’s the backbone of processing for SONAR and RADAR, as well as in medical ultrasound imaging, and now ready for ultrasound in-air applications.
Sonair is on track to achieve safety certification for ADAR by the end of 2025. This is an industry-first for 3D ultrasonic sensing in air.
More than 20 global companies, including AMR manufacturers, industrial manufacturing conglomerates, automotive technology suppliers, and vendors within the autonomous health and cleaning industries, have quietly validated the Sonair ADAR sensor’s effectiveness as part of a successful Early Access Program launched in Summer 2024.
Commercial orders -and endorsements- are already flowing, including from Japan’s FUJI CORPORATION, which has procured ADAR for an upcoming line of autonomous mobile robots, and from a leading Swiss manufacturer of autonomous robots for the cleaning industry.
What is ADAR?
Acoustic detection and ranging (ADAR), a patented innovation by Sonair, is a new category of 3D depth sensor. It empowers autonomous robots with omnidirectional depth perception, enabling robots to “hear” their surroundings in real-time 3D – using airborne soundwaves to interpret spatial information.
The sensor creates a virtual safety shield with a range of 5 meters, that enables people and robots to share space safely. The innovation lies in combining wavelength-matched transducers with efficient signal processing for beamforming and object recognition algorithms.
Sonair ADAR is scheduled to be ready for shipment in July 2025.