Autonomy for the people
Next Generation Award winner Josh de Wit researched self-driving tech during his work placement at Nissan. Kris Culmer finds out what he learned
Following a month-long engineering placement at Jaguar Land Rover, time with Peugeot’s press relations department and research work on hybrid drivetrains at Mclaren, the next spell of work experience for Josh de Wit, the 2016 Autocar Courland Next Generation Award winner, was with Nissan.
The 22-year-old, who is a mechanical engineering student at the University of Sussex, worked with the manufacturer’s autonomous drive vehicle team at the Nissan Technical Centre Europe (NTCE) in Cranfield, Bedfordshire.
NTCE develops vehicles for the European market and is part of Nissan’s Research and Development network, which also has centres in Japan, the US and Europe. Cranfield is where cars such as the original Nissan Qashqai were designed.
Josh won last year’s Next Generation Award for his design of a stacked graphene battery that could drastically shorten recharging times and maximise space and energy efficiency. His passion for future technology meant he was particularly excited to be working with Nissan, because, he says, the company considers there to be “three key areas in the future of the automotive industry”, namely “electric vehicles, artificial intelligence and autonomous drive systems”.
He adds: “Successfully combining those three is what will be defining. Of the manufacturers I’ve had placements with so far, Nissan is the furthest ahead when it comes to the technology for batteries and electric vehicles. It develops its own battery cells, which few other automotive OEM do. That’s a big step ahead for making affordable and, crucially, long-range electric cars.”
Having been driven in a Nissan Leaf electric car, Josh was hugely impressed: “It’s a very smooth, very refined vehicle. The acceleration and the linear power delivery that it has is something that really excites me about electric vehicles.”
The main task Josh was given involved not only understanding the principles of high-level car autonomy, but also analysing how it could be implemented, especially in relation to electric vehicles.
How occupants would potentially interact with such a car was also a consideration, says Josh: “Consumers know that autonomous vehicles are coming. They’ve been talked about for many years, but we’re finally getting more semi-autonomous features – such as adaptive cruise control and automatic emergency braking – on everyday models now.
“Once people are accustomed to self-driving cars, our roads will be much safer, but if you were to bring the technology in tomorrow, people would question its abilities. That’s why Nissan is introducing it step by step.”
This is evident with Nissan’s Pro Pilot system, which was introduced on the Japanese-market Serena MPV model and will be rolled out in the
UK later this year with the facelifted second-generation Qashqai. This system allows the car to drive autonomously and safely in a single lane in heavy traffic on a motorway.
While at Cranfield, Josh worked under the leadership of Dr Yasuhito Sano, one of Nissan’s most senior researchers in the field. Josh was set the task of learning how to control a robot in a virtual world through the Linux software platform, using the Python programming code.
“Essentially, I was learning how interaction occurs between a robot and its environment,” says Josh. “It’s very much related to the principles of an autonomous vehicle; it needs to constantly monitor and analyse its surrounding environment to achieve its objective.”
Research like this is the beginning of programming for autonomous road vehicles – the building blocks of technology that won’t appear on Nissan’s production models for another decade or so.
Dr Sano says: “We asked Josh to find out what we can and cannot do with the software we have now. Despite not being used to the kind of software we use here, he learned it very quickly.
“Of course, a robot is not a vehicle, so there are some limitations – we have a way to go before we can apply this kind of technology to a car. Our ultimate goal is to use autonomous technology to make travelling by car more comfortable and enjoyable.”
Josh says: “The world of software was unfamiliar. Combining artificial intelligence was completely new to me but incredibly interesting. The ability for something to learn by itself and use that data to improve its own performance is phenomenal, and there’s massive potential there for automotive applications.”
Josh was struck by the atmosphere at Nissan: “You’ve got staff from Japan and Britain collaborating really well, and it’s a great team to work in. Nissan’s Japanese origins shine through at Cranfield. Although I’ve never been to Japan, I really like the culture – they’re massively ahead when it comes to new technology.”