NASA and Nissan Chase Self-Driving Car Technology
Google’s self-driving cars won’t be the only robotic vehicles roaming NASA’s Ames Research Center at Moffett Field in California. The U.S. space agency has teamed up with automaker Nissan to test autonomous driving technologies that could find their way into future vehicles both on the road and in space exploration missions.
NASA hopes the five-year partnership can help improve the autonomous vehicle technologies available for its robotic rovers during Mars missions and other future space exploration. On Earth, Nissan has set a 2020 goal for the market debut of cars that can navigate without human intervention under most driving conditions. Researchers from both organizations aim to begin testing the first of a fleet of self-driving vehicles before the end of 2015.
“The work of NASA and Nissan—with one directed to space and the other directed to earth—is connected by similar challenges,” said Carlos Ghosn, president and CEO of Nissan Motor Co, in an 8 January press release. “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.”
More: NASA and Nissan Chase Self-Driving Car Technology - IEEE Spectrum