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.
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