Nissan and NASA extend research into autonomous mobility services
Nissan North America Inc., the US-based subsidiary of Nissan Motor Co. Ltd., announced its agreement with NASA Ames Research Center to collaborate on research and technology development for future autonomous mobility services.
Under the terms of the five-year partnership, researchers from the Nissan Research Center in Silicon Valley and NASA Ames are working to advance autonomous vehicle systems.
In 2017, Nissan introduced Nissan Seamless Autonomous Mobility (SAM), a new platform for managing fleets of autonomous vehicles, developed from NASA technology. This new phase will build on that success to further develop the technology and test the use of SAM for managing autonomous transportation services ahead of public implementations.
Maarten Sierhuis, director of the Nissan Research Center in Silicon Valley, said: “We built SAM from the NASA-developed technology for managing interplanetary rovers as they move around unpredictable landscapes. Our goal is to deploy SAM to help third-party organizations safely integrate a fleet of autonomous vehicles in unpredictable urban environments, for example ride-hailing services, public transportation or logistics and delivery services. The final stage of our existing research agreement with NASA will bring us closer to that goal and test SAM in a working demonstration on public streets.”
Eugene Tu, center director, NASA Ames, said: “One of NASA’s strategic goals is to transfer the technology developed to advance our mission and program objectives to broader commercial and social applications. Using NASA’s work in robotics to accelerate the work required to advance space exploration can also pioneer advances on Earth.”
The research collaboration with NASA is part of Nissan’s roadmap for the technology and business evolution of the automotive industry called Nissan Intelligent Mobility. This roadmap consists of three workstreams of inter-related innovations in autonomous drive (intelligent drive), electrification (intelligent power) and infrastructure technologies (intelligent integration).
SAM represents a major milestone in Nissan intelligent integration, providing the infrastructure to safely and seamlessly integrate autonomous mobility services into existing urban environments.