Toyota Motor Corp is investing US$50 million with Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the hopes of gaining an edge in an accelerating the race to phase out human drivers.
The financial commitment announced on Friday by the Japanese automaker is to be made over the next five years at joint research centers located in Silicon Valley and another technology hub in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Toyota has hired robotics expert Gill Pratt to oversee research aimed at developing artificial intelligence and other innovations that are to enable future car models to navigate roads without people doing all the steering and stopping.
“We believe this research will transform the future of mobility, improving safety and reducing traffic congestion,” said Kiyotaka Ise, a Toyota executive who oversees the company’s research and development group.
Unlike some of its rivals in the technology and auto industries, Toyota believes the day when cars are able to drive entirely by themselves is unlikely to arrive within the next decade.
The company is instead focusing its efforts on developing technologies that would turn a car into the equivalent of an intelligent assistant, which would recognize when it should take over the steering when a driver is distracted or play a favorite song when it detects a driver is in a bad mood.
“What if cars could become our trusted partners?” said Daniela Rus, an MIT professor who will lead the university’s research partnership with the automaker.
Toyota has been working on autonomous driving technology for about 20 years, but it was known as “advanced driving support” back in the 1990s, Ise said.
Pratt, a former program manager at the US’ Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, suspects many people will still want to drive some of the time even when cars are fully equipped to handle the task.
Pratt hopes Toyota’s research will give people the option of relying on computers to do the driving when they are stuck in traffic or traveling down a boring stretch of highway.
“Our focus today is more on the autonomy of people,” said Pratt, who is to be based in Silicon Valley.
Under the Toyota partnership, the MIT research center is to focus on inventing ways for cars to recognize their surroundings and make decisions that avert potential accidents.
If the goals are realized, Toyota might be able to build a car “that is never responsible for a collision,” Rus said.
Besides working on recognition technology, the Stanford research center is to try to create artificial intelligence programs that study human behavior to learn more about the decisionmaking and reasoning that goes into driving, so cars can quickly adjust to potentially dangerous situations on the road.
Stanford’s research is to be led by Li Fei-fei (李飛飛), director of the university’s artificial intelligence laboratory.
Not far away from Stanford, both General Motors Co and Ford Motor Co have established offices in Palo Alto, California, in their own quests to make smarter cars.
Meanwhile, just to the south, Google Inc’s self-driving cars are regularly cruising the roads of the company’s hometown of Mountain View, California, during ongoing testing of the vehicles.
California law still requires humans to be in the self-driving cars to take control in dangerous situations or if something goes wrong.
However, most of the time Google’s self-driving cars are being controlled by a computer. They logged a combined 236,000km in autonomous mode from June 3 through Monday, according to Google.
Shares of contract chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) came under pressure yesterday after a report that Apple Inc is looking to shift some orders from the Taiwanese company to Intel Corp. TSMC shares fell NT$55, or 2.4 percent, to close at NT$2,235 on the local main board, Taiwan Stock Exchange data showed. Despite the losses, TSMC is expected to continue to benefit from sound fundamentals, as it maintains a lead over its peers in high-end process development, analysts said. “The selling was a knee-jerk reaction to an Intel-Apple report over the weekend,” Mega International Investment Services Corp (兆豐國際投顧) analyst Alex Huang
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) is expected to remain Apple Inc’s primary chip manufacturing partner despite reports that Apple could shift some orders to Intel Corp, industry experts said yesterday. The comments came after The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that Apple and Intel had reached a preliminary agreement following more than a year of negotiations for Intel to manufacture some chips for Apple devices. Taiwan Institute of Economic Research (台灣經濟研究院) economist Arisa Liu (劉佩真) said TSMC’s advanced packaging technologies, including integrated fan-out and chip-on-wafer-on-substrate, remain critical to the performance of Apple’s A-series and M-series chips. She said Intel and Samsung
TRANSITION: With the closure, the company would reorganize its Taiwanese unit to a sales and service-focused model, Bridgestone said Bridgestone Corp yesterday announced it would cease manufacturing operations at its tire plant in Hsinchu County’s Hukou Township (湖口), affecting more than 500 workers. Bridgestone Taiwan Co (台灣普利司通) said in a statement that the decision was based on the Tokyo-based tire maker’s adjustments to its global operational strategy and long-term market development considerations. The Taiwanese unit would be reorganized as part of the closure, effective yesterday, and all related production activities would be concluded, the statement said. Under the plan, Bridgestone would continue to deepen its presence in the Taiwanese market, while transitioning to a sales and service-focused business model, it added. The Hsinchu
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has approved a capital budget of US$31.28 billion for production expansion to meet long-term development needs during the artificial intelligence (AI) boom. The company’s board meeting yesterday approved the capital appropriation plan for purposes such as the installation of advanced technology capacity and fab construction, the world’s largest contract chipmaker said in a statement. At an earnings conference last month, TSMC forecast that its capital expenditure for this year would be at the higher end of the US$52 billion to US$56 billion range it forecast in January in response to robust demand for 5G, AI and
RSS