BBC Knowledge April 2017

Nissan and

NASA clear

roadblocks

to a driverless

future

Nissan plans to get autonomous cars driving

on our city streets by 2020, with a little help

from NASA. In fact, you can stick this date

in your calendar, as this seems to be when

the big car companies attending CES say

we’ll see autonomous models in their

showrooms. One of the biggest roadblocks

to this driverless future is, well, roadblocks.

When a driver encounters an obstruction,

like road works, they have to break the rules

of the road to get around: crossing a white line

or driving towards oncoming traffic. But how

do you code an AI to do the same thing –

to act against its own programming? Nissan

thinks it has found an answer – on Mars.

The Mars Curiosity Rover has been pootling

about the Red Planet’s surface without

a driver for almost five years.

Though there aren’t many building

sites or cyclists on Mars, Curiosity

has to be able to handle

the unexpected. Rather than

depend wholly on the rover’s AI,

when Curiosity gets stuck it calls

a human operator back on Earth.

Nissan intends to do the same

with SAM, its Seamless

Autonomous Mobility system.

When a driverless car encounters

an obstacle it can’t navigate within its

programming, it’ll call up a ‘Mobility Manager,’

who will access the car’s cameras and

location, and pull up the most accurate

mapping data the system can find. From there,

the remote pilot can ‘paint’ a new, safe route

around the obstacle, saving each new solution

at a given location to allow for a quicker

response the second time around. At CES,

we were shown a live demo of the tech at

a NASA facility, where the whole procedure

took under a minute, and the data transfer

appeared to be seamless. Of course we were

concerned, given that we seem

to lose all mobile phone signal on

much of the M25, that connectivity would be

an issue. But Nissan says that the link will

be optimised to handle delays – after all,

it’s worked for interplanetary use before.

It might feel slightly counter-productive

to get drivers to help us drive driverless cars,

but SAM is the only system we’ve seen so

far that could potentially remove the need

for someone to sit behind the wheel. Nissan

is also partnering with Microsoft to provide

Cortana-based voice control in its car, with the

bonus that Cortana’s voice recognition should

help make the entire system more secure.

T R U LY

DRIVERLESS

VEHICLES

A ‘Mobility Manager’

takes control of the

car’s sensors to plot

a route around the

obstacle in its path

| CES 2017

INNOVATIONS

20 26 April 2017April 2017