NISSAN has joined forces with NASA to work on autonomous vehicle systems and prepare for commercial application of the technology, it was announced today.
The five-year research and development partnership will see researchers from Nissan’s US Silicon Valley Research Center and NASA’s Ames Research Center at Moffett Field in California focus on autonomous drive systems, human-machine interface solutions, network-enabled applications, and software analysis and verification, all involving sophisticated hardware and software used in road and space applications.
Researchers from the two organisations will test a fleet of zero-emission autonomous vehicles at Ames to demonstrate proof-of-concept remote operation of autonomous vehicles for the transport of materials, goods, payloads and people. For NASA, these tests parallel the way it operates planetary rovers from a mission control centre. The first vehicle of the fleet should be testing by the end of this year.
Carlos Ghosn, President and CEO of Nissan Motor Co, said: “The work of NASA and Nissan – with one directed to space and the other directed to Earth – is connected by similar challenges. The partnership will accelerate Nissan’s development of safe, secure and reliable autonomous drive technology that we will progressively introduce to consumers beginning in 2016 up to 2020.”
Nissan has set 2020 as the timeframe for the introduction of autonomous drive vehicles that can navigate in nearly all situations, including the most complex – city driving.
According to the terms of the partnership, NASA will benefit from Nissan’s shared expertise in innovative component technologies for autonomous vehicles, shared research to inform development of vehicular transport applications, and access to appropriate prototype systems and provision of test beds for robotic software.
S Pete Worden, Director of Ames Research Center, said: “All of our potential topics of research collaboration with Nissan are areas in which Ames has strongly contributed to major NASA programmes. Ames developed Mars rover planning software, robots on board the International Space Station and next-generation air traffic management systems, to name a few. We look forward to applying knowledge developed during this partnership towards future space and aeronautics endeavours.”
“This partnership brings together the best and brightest of NASA and Nissan and validates our investments in Silicon Valley,” said Ghosn.
