Toyota to invest $50M to build self-driving cars
Toyota will EAST PALO ALTO, CALIF. invest $50 million US with Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in hopes of gaining an edge in an accelerating race to phase out human drivers.
The financial commitment announced by the Japanese automaker will be made over the next five years at joint research centres in Silicon Valley and another technology hub in Cambridge, Mass.
Toyota has hired robotics expert Dr. Gill Pratt to oversee research aimed at developing artificial intelligence that will enable future car models to navigate the roads without people.
“We believe this research will transform the future of mobility, improving safety and reducing traffic congestion,” said Kiyotaka Ise, a Toyota executive overseeing 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 instead is focusing its efforts on developing technology that can turn a car into the equivalent of an intelligent assistant that recognizes when it should take over the steering when a driver is distracted.
“What if cars could become our trusted partners?” mused Daniela Rus, an MIT professor who will lead the university’s research partnership with the automaker.
Major tech companies such as Google and Uber are competing against a range of automakers to make robot cars that will be better drivers than people and save lives by causing fewer accidents.
Google has been working on a fleet of self-driving cars for the past six years. Its goal is to have the cars capable of driving completely on their own by 2020.
Ride-hailing pioneer Uber has teamed up with Carnegie Mellon University in its quest to build driverless cars.
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 U.S. government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, suspects many people will still want to drive some of the time. He hopes Toyota’s research will give the option of relying on computers to do the job when they are stuck in traffic or travelling down a boring stretch of highway.
“Our focus today is more on the autonomy of people,” said Pratt, who will be based in Silicon Valley.
Under the Toyota partnership, the MIT research centre will focus on inventing ways for cars to recognize surroundings and make decisions to 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.
The Stanford research centre will try to create artificial intelligence programs that study human behaviour to learn more about the reasoning that goes into driving, so cars can quickly adjust. Stanford’s research will be led by Fei-Fei Li, director of the university’s artificial intelligence laboratory.
Not far away from Stanford, both General Motors and Ford have established offices in Palo Alto, Calif., in their own quests to make smarter cars.
Meanwhile, just to the south, Google’s self-driving cars are regularly cruising the roads of the company’s hometown of Mountain View, Calif., during ongoing testing of the vehicles.