Nissan is a global automobile OEM with numerous vehicle manufacturing facilities in the UnitedStates.
The vehicle assembly facility in Smyrna Tennessee spans 884 acres and manufacturesover 820 vehicles per day.
These assembled vehicles need to be marshaled to a loading station located 5 miles away from the assembly line for storage and further distribution amongst dealerships.
As of now, drivers are employed to drive these finished vehicles to the loading station, who then have to make their way back to the assembly line and repeat this process day-in and
day-out. This labor-intensive process costs an automaker over 25 million dollars year on year. Additionally, shortage of labor and absence of drivers can create bottlenecks in the supply chain.
To eliminate this recurring cost, a solution like OuterSense can be deployed automate this process. It would require infrastructure-based perception sensors to be placed along the path,
and the extroceptive system will help the vehicles accurately maintain their lane, avoid any obstacles on the road and guide them towards their destination.
The way this would work is, these sentries will track the cars, estimate their pose, and communicate this information to a cloud-based decision making system.
Furthermore, the cars themselves will communicate rudimentary odometry data like vehicle speed and steering angle to the decision making system. The decision making system contains an intelligent algorithm that can assimilate all the incoming data, analyse it and compute motion cues for each car. These motion cues are then sent to the cars, which enables them to traverse safely along the path. The system can drive multiple cars at once and make smart decisions to avoid any potential collisions. To ensure safety and human oversight, a dedicated human safety supervisor is integrated into the system. This supervisor has the capability to remotely take control of a vehicle in the event of anomalies or unforeseen circumstances. As an additional level of safety an emergency stop button would be present to override all motion cues and stop all vehicles safely at any given point of time.
Thus, the newly assembled vehicles can be marshaled to the shipping yard without any human driver via OuterSense, saving time, labor, and money for the automaker.