It can be called as one of the landmark collaborations, when Nissan America announced its collaboration with National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) for the development of its autonomous mobility services at the CES 2018. The five year research programme will see researchers from Nissan Research Centre in Silicon Valley and NASA’s Ames Research Centre come together to make advancements in the field of autonomous mobility that will also include a working model in Silicon Valley.
Nissan is already working on its ‘Nissan Intelligent Mobility’ that presents its take on the future of mobility. This consists of three categories namely autonomous vehicles, electrification of vehicles and finally the infrastructure technologies or ‘intelligent integration’ as Nissan terms it. This collaboration aims to further enhance the technology and test it before implementing on a large scale. SAM plays a major role in ‘Nissan Intelligent Integration’ as it provides the required infrastructure to amalgamate autonomous mobility services to the urban conditions.
Speaking on the Nissan-NASA tie up, the director of the Nissan Research Center in Silicon Valley Maarten Sierhuis said, “We built SAM from the technology NASA developed 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.”