Chiba, Japan—Nissan is working
toward robot cars one step at a time.
Rich DeMuro of KTLA-TV in Nissan's
Robotic NSC-2015 Car
The auto manufacturer this week at Japan’s CEATEC
showed off the NSC-2015, a prototype electric car that can park it self, come
when you call it and warn you about burglars.
As I sat in the passenger seat, the
NSC 2015—a highly modified version of the all-electric Leaf connected to cloud
computing services—managed to go forward, slip into reverse, execute a 90
degree turn and back in all on its own.
A few minutes later, a Nissan
representative clicked a few buttons on his smart phone and the car drove
toward him. The idea is that you won’t have to find your car in a parking lot
in the future. Instead, it will come to you. Overall, it’s more elaborate than
the self-parking systems from rival Toyota.
We also conducted a mock break-in. A
thief (in reality a Nissan employee in a hoodie) walked over and hovered by the
car. The car sensed him and sent a message to the smart phone: “Your car
detected someone by your car. Would you like to see a real-time movie?” A
360-degree live video of the car was then streamed to the cell phone from its
exterior cameras. When we determined it wasn’t a family member or an animal but
instead a junior product manager, another click of the smart phone set off the
car alarm.
The first elements of Nissan’s
robotic strategy will, ideally, hit the market in 2015 and 2016.
The car can’t drive itself down the
street, admitted Tooru Futami, expert leader in the IT and ITS Engineering
Department at Nissan. The first versions likely won’t even be able to show off
their driving skills in random parking lots. The self-parking functionality
will only initially work in lots dedicated to robotic cars. If the lot isn’t
filled with robotic cars all connected to the cloud, the car can’t form a
picture of the surrounding environment that’s accurate enough to drive through.
It relies on LTE cellular and sensors placed around the area rather than GPS to
navigate, in part because the terrain and location of objects constantly
changes in parking lots.
But it’s a step forward. At 2009 as
this event, Nissan showed off self-navigating robots that could avoid each other in accidents based on
algorithms based on the way fish avoid each other. Nissan, however, didn’t have
full-fledged cars then. Instead, it showed off vacuum cleaner sized-vehicles.
Since then, of course, Google
has jumped into robotic cars and states have begun to modify their laws to
allow them on the road. (Side note: Nissan told me back in 2007 before the Leaf
was formally announced that it planned to come out with an all-electric by 2011 or 2012
so they beat their schedule on that mark.)
The auto industry has been examining
these problems for years, often for the safety benefits. Robots can be built to
have better reaction time than humans and thereby help reduce accidents, as well
as better utilize parking spaces. Other benefits could include saving gas and
avoiding traffic jams. Incrementally adding robotics to cars will additionally
help consumers acclimate to the concept.
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