Skip to main content

Toyota announces artificial intelligence research collaboration with MIT and Stanford

You may have seen Google’s self-driving pod car, or the Audi RS 7 that hot lapped Sonoma Raceway, and thought they were pretty clever. But while these cars may be smart, they are not intelligent.

All autonomous vehicles built so far rely on programming to make decisions. If engineers did not write software for a given scenario, the car simply does not know what to do. One possible solution is developing artificial intelligence capabilities for future robot cars, and at a press conference in Palo Alto today, Toyota said it will take the first steps to develop that.

Recommended Videos

The Japanese carmaker will invest $50 million over the next five years to establish joint research centers at MIT and Stanford. Researchers will work to develop artificially-intelligent systems and investigate how they can be applied to future self-driving cars.

The combined research effort will focus on improving the ability of vehicles to recognize objects in different environments, provide “elevated judgment” of conditions, and safely interact with other vehicles and pedestrians, said Dr. Gill Pratt, who recently joined Toyota to head up the research project. Pratt previously worked at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), where he led its robotics challenge.

In addition to reducing crashes and improving efficiency, Toyota believes artificially intelligent self-driving cars could increase the mobility of a greater number of people. They could allow the elderly and disabled to attain a greater degree of independence, the company believes, noting that technology born of this research could also be applied to healthcare.

Toyota did not discuss any further details or specific goals for the research program; its robotics expert, Pratt, noted that this latest funding announcement is separate from any efforts Toyota might make to develop an autonomous prototype.

The company has yet to join the parade of self-driving prototypes unveiled to the public by other carmakers like Audi, Mercedes-Benz, and Nissan, and has made statements indicating that it is interested only in driver-assist systems, rather than full autonomy.

If Toyota can develop viable artificial intelligence for self-driving cars, though, it may leapfrog those efforts. Rather than responding to specific situations in a pre-programmed manner, an artificially-intelligent car would actively decide to intervene or take a certain action, in a sense making the same moral decisions that human drivers must make behind the wheel.

Stephen Edelstein
Stephen is a freelance automotive journalist covering all things cars. He likes anything with four wheels, from classic cars…
Waymo’s robotaxis are rolling into another U.S. city
A Waymo driverless car.

Waymo has been testing its driverless cars in Miami intermittently for the last five years, but now it’s making serious moves to launch a robotaxi service there.

The Alphabet-owned company revealed on Thursday that it’ll start testing its Jaguar I-PACE autonomous cars on the streets of the city early next year, with the aim of launching a robotaxi service for residents and visitors via the Waymo One app in 2026.

Read more
Waymo, Nexar present AI-based study to protect ‘vulnerable’ road users
waymo data vulnerable road users ml still  1 ea18c3

Robotaxi operator Waymo says its partnership with Nexar, a machine-learning tech firm dedicated to improving road safety, has yielded the largest dataset of its kind in the U.S., which will help inform the driving of its own automated vehicles.

As part of its latest research with Nexar, Waymo has reconstructed hundreds of crashes involving what it calls ‘vulnerable road users’ (VRUs), such as pedestrians walking through crosswalks, biyclists in city streets, or high-speed motorcycle riders on highways.

Read more
Are self-driving cars the death of car ownership?
Tesla Cybercab at night

Self-driving cars are coming. It remains to be seen how long that will take. Plenty of vehicles can more or less drive themselves on highways, but for now, they still can't completely reliably drive themselves on all streets, in all conditions, taking into account all different variables. One thing is clear, though: the tech industry sees autonomous driving as the future of personal transportation, and they're spending billions to reach that goal.

But what happens when we get there? Tesla made headlines for not only announcing its new Cybercab fully autonomous vehicle, but simultaneously claiming that customers will be able to buy one. That's right, at least if Tesla is to be believed, the Cybercab doesn't necessarily represent Tesla building its own Uber-killing fleet of self-driving cars, but instead giving people the ownership over the self-driving car industry.

Read more