FENNECCase Study · Physical Testing & Validation
Things that never happen keep happening: How ASAP Testing replaced dozens of manual tests in Amazon's Proteus perception program
When Amazon Robotics needed to prove that Proteus, its first fully autonomous mobile robot, could safely perceive the people and obstacles around it, the testing plan was rigorous, approved by TÜV Rheinland in advance, and executed almost entirely by hand. Engineers manually positioned standardized test objects around a moving robot, ran dozens of repetitions per test point, and then spent weeks compiling the data into 200-plus-page report documents. Fennec's automated test cells replaced that process end to end: connected directly to the robot and its environment, physically repeatable, and audit-ready reports generated in hours instead of weeks.
At a glance
Industry: Advanced Robotics / Autonomous Mobile Robots
Application: Physical verification and validation of perception at the full-system level
Standards: Test methodology agreed with TÜV Rheinland; standardized test pieces per IEC 61496
Solutions: ASAP Testing (automated physical test cells) + ASAP Platform (T2 qualified tools in the validation model)
Outcome: Manual perception testing and reporting replaced with automated, repeatable physical verification; re-verification per release cycle became routine instead of a program event
Why it worked
The Proteus test plan was exactly what a certification body wants to see. The problem was execution: every test performed by hand, an engineer judging object placement “close enough,” multiple phases per test across plans containing over 60 tests, then two weeks compiling a 200-plus-page Word report. And manual testing carries a structural validity problem beyond the hours. A person holding a test object appears in the robot's field of view, contaminating the very perception scene under test, and human performance drifts across repetitions. In manual testing, the measurement instrument is a person.
Fennec's ASAP Testing cells automate the entire verification chain. The cell commands the robot's movements, positions test objects with instrumented precision, tracks ground truth continuously, and extracts the robot's own data in real time. Placement is exact and identical on every repetition, no human appears in the sensor's field of view, and audit-ready reports generate automatically in a format the assessor already knows. In practice, Amazon Robotics tech operators completed full end-to-end testing in three days, with reporting running in parallel.
Because the cell is repeatable, re-verification stops being a program event and becomes routine. When firmware or detection software changes, the affected suite re-runs at the pace of the release cycle without pulling engineers off development work.
Download the full case study
Get the full story: the hidden validity costs of manual testing, how the instrumented test cell works, and why physically verified safety is becoming the industry's insurance expectation.
3 days
Full end-to-end test execution by tech operators, with data processing and reporting running in parallel
2 weeks → hours
Report compilation, from hand-built 200+ page Word document to auto-generated audit-ready reports
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