CES 2017: Nissan suffers autonomous oops

Nissan could have blamed Russian hackers when a live demonstration of its futuristic Seamless Autonomous Mobility (SAM) system went wrong at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week.

The demo was supposed to show how Nissan via SAM will have the ability to step-in and directly instruct a driverless autonomous vehicle during those on-road situations when the car cannot ‘think’ through a problem it encounters.

The scenario is a road crew trying to redirect the autonomous car around a work area. For a driverless car programmed to follow specific commands, what’s easy for a human to understand can become a huge problem.

Nissan describes SAM this way: "Developed from NASA technology, SAM partners in-vehicle artificial intelligence (AI) with human support to help autonomous vehicles make decisions in unpredictable situations and build the knowledge of in-vehicle AI.

"This technology will enable millions of driverless cars to co-exist with human drivers and to navigate unforeseen situations that occur on city streets, such as accidents, road construction, or other obstacles."

SAM in theory makes sense. Of course, the driverless car must first realise it is facing a problem and then, using SAM, alert a human for assistance via a secure satellite link.

Adding drama to the live demonstration, the human was located in Las Vegas on the Nissan stand during CES and the confused driverless car was facing road works on site 1000km away at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California.

Driverless technology is far from consumer-ready, with Nissan and all other vehicle manufacturers working to develop autonomous vehicles many years away from delivering fully self-driving technology to showrooms.

As Nissan proved at CES, there are still so many glitches to overcome before you and I can buy and trust a driverless car.

Nissan’s demonstration went wrong because a secure US military-grade satellite link dropped out. Who would have thought?

Maarten Sierhuis, director of the Nissan Research Center in California, is the man whose team is developing Nissan’s artificial intelligence platform to support driverless vehicles. SAM is his baby.

After a few minutes of head scratching, Sierhuis explained: “The GPS on the vehicle is not working for some reason. We need to have a connection with the satellite to send a signal through the cloud to the vehicle so the system knows where the car is.

"What we’re going to do is take 15 minutes and try to sync with the satellite. It has nothing to do with the software. Everything is working fine but the car doesn’t know where it is.”

Oops.