Nissan has taken NASA technology built for the Mars Rover to help control fleets of autonomous vehicles. It’s called Seamless Autonomous Mobility (SAM), and Nissan believes it’s a solution for when vehicles don’t know how to handle the unexpected.
Though even basic self-driving car systems can handle the vast majority of situations — heading down a well-lit highway in nice weather — the biggest obstacle to fully autonomous driving is how to handle unusual or unpredictable or just plain weird situations.