Who will build the first robot taxis? Google has a working prototype but no experience in manufacturing cars. Uber, meanwhile, knows the transportation business but has only just started working on autonomous vehicles with Carnegie Mellon University.<\/p>\n
Documents obtained by IEEE Spectrum suggest the first cab capable of driving itself might be made by Nissan. In January 2015, the Japanese automaker announced that it would be working with NASA to \u201cdemonstrate proof-of-concept remote operation of autonomous vehicles for the transport of . . . goods . . . and people.\u201d Using a California Public Records Act request, Spectrum has uncovered more details on the particular technologies Nissan and NASA plan to share and, more important, that the main goal of their collaboration appears to be the development of a fleet of remotely-supervised autonomous taxis.<\/p>\n
The documents reveal that Nissan is planning to have prototype cars operating within two years. Google and Uber are both rumored to be pursuing the same goal, so a race for the mythical robo-taxi is on.<\/p>\n
Nissan has long been a champion of self-driving cars, with its chairman and CEO Carlos Ghosn claiming the company would introduce autonomous vehicles by 2018. The company also makes taxis, such as the NV200 \u201cTaxi of Tomorrow,\u201d which is about to replace New York City\u2019s traditional Ford Crown Victoria cabs. An all-electric model, the e-NV200, is already on sale in Europe.
\nThe agreement between the Nissan Research Center Silicon Valley and NASA\u2019s Ames Research Center calls for the space agency to \u201cprovide expertise to develop and test supervisory control of multiple autonomous vehicles for transport service.\u201d If this sounds futuristic, it\u2019s because it is: the project will include modifying NASA\u2019s software for operating planetary rovers, visualizing their surroundings, and controlling them with telerobotic interfaces. NASA will also assist Nissan in the design, development, testing, and assessment of prototypes.<\/p>\n
That assessment will happen right at NASA Ames, a complex of buildings, labs, and hangars in the heart of Silicon Valley. A number of streets and parking lots will act as a practical test bed for Nissan\u2019s autonomous electric vehicles, potentially alongside Google\u2019s self-driving cars, which are also due to begin testing there this year. The parking lots in this area will be closed to all other pedestrians and vehicles.<\/p>\n
One of the technologies that NASA will modify is its Robot Application Programming Interface Delegate (RAPID), open source software that simplifies communications between robots and their command-and-control systems. RAPID has been used with walking and flying robots, as well as in an experiment involving a wheeled rover on Earth controlled from the International Space Station. Nissan will also make use of NASA\u2019s Vision Workbench, an image processing and computer vision library, and algorithms from NASA\u2019s rover software for robotic exploration.<\/p>\n
Particularly useful for Nissan is likely to be NASA\u2019s Virtual Environment for Remote Visual Exploration (VERVE). This interactive 3D visualization tool was designed to incorporate multiple data feeds from Mars rovers, including stereo video cameras, LIDAR systems, digital compasses, and inertial measurement units\u2014some of the same sensors found on self-driving vehicles today.<\/p>\n
\u201cTypically we work with rovers to explore terrain that has not been well mapped,\u201d says a document written by researchers at NASA\u2019s Intelligent Robotics Group, which developed VERVE. \u201cAs the rovers traverse an area, they build more accurate maps.\u201d This fits well with Nissan\u2019s autonomous vehicle technology. Unlike Google\u2019s self-driving cars, which rely on ultra-detailed maps accurate to centimeters, Nissan uses what it calls \u201csparse maps,\u201d created with third-party data that offers much less detail. If effective, this approach promises to be easier to scale than Google\u2019s expensive and data-intensive maps.<\/p>\n
According to the Nissan-NASA agreement, the taxi demonstration will integrate a service-oriented software architecture, road map, and database. Software will include a \u201ctelerobotic user interface,\u201d \u201creal-time performance monitoring,\u201d and \u201cautomatic event summarization,\u201d. Any lessons learned are intended to \u201cenable Nissan North America to better plan for development and commercialization of autonomous vehicles and applications.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nissan already has a thriving taxi business and some of the most accomplished autonomous vehicle prototypes in the world. If NASA can swiftly adapt its rover technologies into the supervisory and control systems Nissan needs, sleekly space-age robot taxis might be pulling up to the curb sooner than many people think.<\/p>\n
Article source by Mark Harris in IEEE Spectrum<\/p>\n
http:\/\/goo.gl\/YQsGYT\u2028http:\/\/spectrum.ieee.org\/cars-that-think\/transportation\/self-driving\/will-nissan-beat-google-and-uber-to-self-driving-taxis<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Who will build the first robot taxis? Google has a working prototype but no experience in manufacturing cars. Uber, meanwhile, knows the transportation business but has only just started working on autonomous vehicles with Carnegie Mellon University. Documents obtained by IEEE Spectrum suggest the first cab capable of driving itself might be made by Nissan. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":56,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,8],"tags":[22,21,19,20,18],"class_list":["post-55","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-article","category-hello","tag-are","tag-automotive-robotics-engineering","tag-base","tag-binus-aso","tag-greaternusantara"],"featured_image":{"phone":"https:\/\/base.binus.ac.id\/automotive-robotics-engineering\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2016\/04\/Cover0010.jpg","tablet":"https:\/\/base.binus.ac.id\/automotive-robotics-engineering\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2016\/04\/Cover0010.jpg"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/base.binus.ac.id\/automotive-robotics-engineering\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/base.binus.ac.id\/automotive-robotics-engineering\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/base.binus.ac.id\/automotive-robotics-engineering\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/base.binus.ac.id\/automotive-robotics-engineering\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/base.binus.ac.id\/automotive-robotics-engineering\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/base.binus.ac.id\/automotive-robotics-engineering\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":60,"href":"https:\/\/base.binus.ac.id\/automotive-robotics-engineering\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55\/revisions\/60"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/base.binus.ac.id\/automotive-robotics-engineering\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/56"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/base.binus.ac.id\/automotive-robotics-engineering\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/base.binus.ac.id\/automotive-robotics-engineering\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/base.binus.ac.id\/automotive-robotics-engineering\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}