NASA to work with Nissan on self-driving car technology

Nissan has partnered with NASA to develop autonomous driving vehicles. The technology to be developed can be useful not only for self-driving cars, but also for rovers, for example, that NASA deploys on Mars.

The cooperation agreement has a term of five years. Nissan will conduct the research primarily in Silicon Valley, where it has an R&D lab. NASA is also active with its Ames Research Center in California. Among other things, research is being done on robotics.

Nissan says it can learn a lot from the technology that NASA has used in the two robot cars that have been placed on the surface of Mars, the Spirit and the Opportunity. The so-called Mars Rovers have proven to be very reliable. In addition, NASA has developed the technology to control the robot cars over a distance of millions of kilometers.

NASA, for its part, believes it can benefit from Nissan’s research into autonomous driving vehicles. Among other things, Nissan is conducting trials with electric cars that can find their way fully automatically in urban areas. Because traffic in cities is often chaotic and unpredictable, companies like Nissan face a huge challenge in developing technology that allows a car to drive safely through the city. NASA hopes Nissan’s technology can be used to give robotic cars on distant planets more autonomy.