Nissan and NASA partner to jointly Develop and Deploy Autonomous Drive Vehicles by End of Year, Nissan
“Nissan Motor Co., through its North American-based organization, and NASA today announced the formation of a five-year research and development partnership to advance autonomous vehicle systems and prepare for commercial application of the technology. Researchers from Nissan’s U.S. Silicon Valley Research Center and NASA’s Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif., will focus on autonomous drive systems, human-machine interface solutions, network-enabled applications, and software analysis and verification, all involving sophisticated hardware and software used in road and space applications.”
Keith’s 8 Jan 8:00 pm ET note: This is rather cool news. Too bad NASA Ames PAO has not posted or released anything about it because who cares, right?
Nissan, la Leaf sulla scia dei rover marziani: partnership con la Nasa, Quattroruote
Keith’s 9 Jan 8:48 am ET update: Stories are online in Italy about this. Nothing online at NASA.
Also – it is rather strange that ARC has no link on their event page for the NASA Cube Quest Challenge Summit held at ARC this week. Again, who cares, right?
Keith’s 9 Jan 2:40 pm ET update: NASA Ames PAO finally posted a short thing on their website – a day after Nissan sent materials out to media outlets. But has ARC PAO sent this out to news media who might want to cover this story? Did they have this material ready the day the event happened? Of course not.

Biologist, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA Space Biologist and Payload integrator, Editor of NASAWatch.com and Astrobiology.com, Lapsed climber, Explorer, Synaesthete, Former Challenger Center board member...

8 replies on “NASA's Stealth Autonomous Vehicle Partnership (Update)”

  2. Statement from Director of NASA’s Ames Research Lab
    “The more we look at it, the more there are a lot of similarities there,” commented Pete Worden, the director of the Ames Research Center.
    He added: “We have a rover on Mars. It is not very autonomous. As we go deeper into space, into more and more dangerous locations, we need to add that autonomy.”

    Interesting that Pete Worden is the motivator here. Only question mark is whether the Mars 2020 project (JPL?) is on board with it. Getting a reasonable level of autonomy into the next Mars rover so that it could cover 50km a day instead of 50m could do a lot to bridge the gap between human and robotic performance. Oops, what am I saying???

    1. The Mars rovers are quite autonomous, including the MER 2003 rovers. They do hazard avoidance, path planning, etc.
      As long ago as 2004, Mark Maimone (https://www-robotics.jpl.na… reported that about 30% of the traverse distance (a few km then) was autonomous.

      Ultimately, the problem is not autonomy, it’s energy: driving takes power to run the motors, and it takes power to run the flight computer to do the autonomy.

      The big speed limitation for MER is that the autonomous algorithms require significant CPU time, so it’s “look, compute, drive”. It turns the nominal 3.75 cm/s into 0.6 cm/s. But even so, even as far back as 2004, there were single day drives close to 100m for both rovers.

      That’s not to say that more autonomy wouldn’t be desirable, but as everyone knows, there is a finite amount of time and money to implement it, even if there weren’t the laws of physics energy constraints.

      1. My point exactly. the MERs have less computing power than a cell phone. If that’s still the case with Mars 2020 we are sacrificing productivity. With its RTG power source I can’t see Curiosity being limited for power for either the CPU or drive motors, but it moves quite slowly as well.

        1. The RTG system on Curiosity only produces 125 W, but compared to solar cells it can do it 24/7 for years. MER got about 900 Watt-Hr/sol from solar panels early on and is down somewhat after all these years (410 WHr/sol?). The “peak power” available to drive the motors isn’t that different.

          And, of course, one needs to fly radiation tolerant high reliability processors, which tend to be somewhat “behind the curve” compared to consumer devices, both in terms of Watts/MIPS and in terms of raw processing horsepower.

          Changing processors increases risk and cost (new software, new testing, etc.). Mission designers have to trade off where do you spend your money, schedule, and risk: on driving or on science. If you can get the science done on M2020 with the MSL system, then there’s no pressing need to go faster.

          It’s just like race cars: “You can go as fast as you like, how much do you want to spend?”
          Except that Mars rovers have to do something other than demonstrate autonomous roving.

  3. So it’s hopelessly naive to think that different NASA centers could work together as, well, a team?

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