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Nissan's self-driving cars to use NASA's AI technology

Nissan looks to tap into NASA’s AI prowess to power their cars.

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Nissan announced their intention to use NASA technology in the company’s autonomous vehicles. During Nissan’s keynote at CES 2017, CEO Carlos Ghosn announced that the next lot of its Leaf electric cars will use autonomous driving technology from the American space agency.

The next line of the electric cars will be integration with NASA’s SAM (Seamless Autonomous Mobility) system. The technology is meant to tackle one of the biggest problems with autonomous vehicles: deciding when to hand over control to humans. 

SAM will show vital information to its “mobility manager” whenever the system sees a confusing obstacle. The driver can then instruct the AI to perform an action like pull over to the side of the road. This information is gathered from LIDAR, an array of cameras and other onboard radars. Nissan claims that SAM will get smarter over time, meaning that the more a driver uses the technology, the less reliant the technology will become on human intervention. 

SAM is based on NASA's Visual Environment for Remote Exploration (VERVE) which is used to oversee robots -- like NASA’s Curiosity -- on the space agency interplanetary missions. 

Apart from the Mars rover technology, the new Leaf cars will also integrate Nissan's own self-driving technology called ProPilot. The system relies on cameras and is currently only applicable in a limited range of driving conditions.

Nissan hasn't announced pricing or an official consumer release date of the next-generation Leaf cars armed with these technologies.
‘Image courtesy: Wiki Commons

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