Sonair, a sensor technology company in Oslo, Norway, is set to debut its ADAR (Acoustic Detection and Ranging) sensor to North American audiences at Automate 2025 next week in Detroit. Designed to boost safety in collaborative human-robot workspaces, ADAR aims to improve how autonomous mobile robots perceive and interact with their surroundings. “Safety just got a lot simpler — and better adapted to detect people,” stated Knut Sandven, CEO of Sonair. “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.” The sensor earned Sonair a spot in the Automate Startup Challenge, highlighting the potential of its technology within the competitive automation landscape. Current 2D lidar safety scanners often only detect a person’s legs in a single horizontal plane, according to Sonair. The company said it addresses this limitation with its patented ADAR technology. This approach provides 3D sensing, with a single ADAR sensor offering a 180 x 180-degree field of view and a 5 m (16.4 ft.) range for safety functions. The core technology underpinning ADAR has been in development for over two decades at Norway’s MiNaLab sensor and nanotechnology research center. Sonair uses beamforming, a processing technique commonly used in sonar, radar, and medical ultrasound imaging, to adapt this method for in-air ultrasonic applications.

Full report : Scandinavian startup, Sonair debuts ADAR, a 3D ultrasonic sensor for autonomous mobile robots.