Nissan North America announced plans to further collaborate with the California-based NASA Ames Research Center on the development of future autonomous mobility services.

Under a five-year research and development partnership, Nissan Research Center in Silicon Valley and NASA Ames have worked together to advance autonomous vehicle systems. In January 2017, Nissan introduced Seamless Autonomous Mobility (SAM), a platform for managing fleets of autonomous vehicles. SAM relies on technology that NASA developed for the U.S. space program. 

This new phase in the collaboration will build on that success to further develop the technology and test the use of SAM for managing autonomous transportation services, according to Nissan.

“We built SAM from technology NASA developed for managing interplanetary rovers as they move around unpredictable landscapes,” explained Maarten Sierhuis, director of the Nissan Research Center in Silicon Valley. “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.”

One of NASA’s strategic goals is to transfer its aerospace technology to broader commercial and social applications.

“Using NASA’s work in robotics to accelerate the deployment of autonomous mobility services is a perfect example of how the considerable work required to advance space exploration can also pioneer advances here on Earth,” said Eugene Tu, center director of NASA Ames.