Self-driving car fleets 'will have human back-up'

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.

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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.