Front view of self driving car available for sharing

Self-driving car fleets ‘will have human back-up’

We’re always excited to see how manufacturers are responding to new technologies that are moving us towards driverless vehicles in the future. Take a look below at some of the tests being run by Nissan.

Fleets of self-driving cars will be helped to negotiate tricky traffic obstacles by ‘mobility managers’ in a remote control centre, according to Nissan’s expert in artificial intelligence (AI).

The idea is to deploy human intelligence remotely to allow a vehicle to keep moving in a situation when self-driving sensors can’t work out what to do.

“These are like air traffic controllers, they facilitate the flow, rather than control the vehicle remotely with a joystick,” says Maarten Sierhuis, director of the Nissan Research Center and a former NASA engineer.

Nissan is using technology that was developed by NASA to help robot vehicles negotiate the surface of Mars.

Once the ‘mobility manager’ has solved a traffic problem for one self-driving car, the solution is then communicated to the Cloud, where it can be shared with other self-driving cars that will then be able to negotiate the obstacle without referring back.

The buzzword for the technology is ‘Distributed Artificial Intelligence’ in which cars, the Cloud and humans share their intelligence to solve a problem.

Nissan calls it Seamless Autonomous Mobility (SAM) and has been testing its operation on a fleet of disguised prototypes in California, US.

This article was from AutoCar and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network. Please direct all licensing questions to legal@newscred.com.


Although this technology is still quite far away, there is lots of exciting innovation on the horizon for Motability Scheme customers, such as Automatic Emergency Brakes, parking sensors and voice recognition technology. You can find out more about the cars on offer with the Scheme using our car search tool.

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