Nissan and NASA have inked a partnership deal that will see the duo working on to build an autonomous vehicle.
The car maker and space agency announced the five-year research and development deal on Thursday. As part of the deal, engineers from Nissan’s Silicon Valley Research Center will join NASA researchers to develop and test autonomous cars at the space agency’s Ames Research Center at Moffett Field in California. The first vehicle is expected to be tested at the facility by the end of 2015.
“The work of NASA and Nissan – with one directed to space and the other directed to earth, is connected by similar challenges,” said Carlos Ghosn, president and CEO of Nissan Motor Co.
“The partnership brings together the best and brightest of NASA and Nissan and validates our investments in Silicon Valley.”
“The partnership will accelerate Nissan’s development of safe, secure and reliable autonomous drive technology that we will progressively introduce to consumers beginning in 2016 up to 2020,” Carlos added.
The experts involved in the project will focus on developing autonomous drive systems, network-enabled applications, human-machine interface solutions, and software analysis and verification, involving hardware and software used in space applications.
“All of our potential topics of research collaboration with Nissan are areas in which Ames has strongly contributed to major NASA programs,” said director of Ames Research Center, S. Pete Worden.
“Ames developed Mars rover planning software, robots onboard the International Space Station and Next Generation air traffic management systems to name a few. We look forward to applying knowledge developed during this partnership toward future space and aeronautics endeavors.”
This is not the first project that Nasa and Nissan have collaborated on. In 2005 the two organizations teamed up to develop more comfortable and safer car seats.
