Nissan and NASA team up to research autonomous driving

It has been almost five years since we last mentioned an alliance between a car company and NASA, since Chrysler partnered with the space agency in 2010. This time, it is Nissan that has decided to join forces with the engineers and scientists of the American organization to work over the next five years on autonomous driving and its commercial applications.

Researchers from Nissan’s R&D center in Silicon Valley and NASA’s Ames center, located in the Californian town of Moffett Field, will dedicate themselves to developing advances in fields such as autonomous driving systems, interfaces for vehicles, connectivity, and software analysis and verification software.

The tests relating to autonomous cars are scheduled to begin in late 2015, and will use a fleet of electric vehicles that will be remotely driven to transport materials, goods, and people. This method will be similar to the one NASA uses when it controls from Earth the rovers it sends into space.

Nissan is convinced of the value that NASA’s support will bring in achieving its goal of bringing autonomous driving to the public in the coming years. Its chairman and CEO, Carlos Ghosn, stated at the alliance presentation: “This union will accelerate the development at Nissan of an autonomous driving technology that is safe and reliable, which we expect to offer progressively to consumers between 2016 and 2020.”

NASA will benefit from the know-how that Nissan possesses not only in autonomous driving, but also in applications for vehicle transport and test fields for software robotics. These are precisely the areas in which the research teams at the Ames center have specialized, having contributed to NASA projects such as the design of the software equipping the Mars rover and various robots of the International Space Station.

Source | Nissan