Toyota Pledges $50M To Research AI For Autonomous Vehicles, Hires DARPA’s Dr

The financial commitment announced Friday by the Japanese automaker will be made over the next five years at joint research centers located in Silicon Valley and another technology hub in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The distinction is a significant one, according to Gill Pratt, a prominent American roboticist, who has left his position at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Pentagon to direct the new effort. He spearheaded the DARPA Robotics Challenge, a competition that brought teams from around the world together to compete for $3.5 million in prize money. But, Toyota is investing in research technologies that will assist human drivers for safe driving instead of replacing them altogether.

Toyota, MIT and Stanford also will explore applying intelligent-vehicle tech to human-interactive robots and information services.

University research leaders, professors Fe-Fe Li of Stanford and Daniela Rus of MIT both reiterated the collaboration’s primary focus on safety.

The first cars with AI technology will work as partners with the driver to make safe decisions, Li said, so devising ways to carefully and comfortably share control between the human and the computer will be instrumental in this technology gaining the public’s trust. Dr. Pratt’s hiring also seems to indicate Toyota is taking this project seriously.

Pratt said the goal is to develop systems that will intelligently transport goods and people not only outdoors, but indoors, inside of their homes and “for all people to be able to have more meaningful lives, and to have mobility be an integral part of it“.

Toyota Motor Co. 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.

Research at MIT will focus on “advanced architectures” that will let cars perceive, understand, and interpret their surroundings.

“We’re not saying full autonomy will never be done”, Pratt added, but “we’re not waiting for the fully autonomous vehicle before we show what we can do”. Google’s self-driving cars are on the streets of California (and Texas), racking up miles of experience on local roads and highways. Google has been developing self-driving cars, as are Apple and Uber.