Toyota to Finance $50 Million ‘Intelligent’ Car Project

Toyota to Finance $50 Million ‘Intelligent’ Car Project

The Toyota Motor Corporation announced on Friday an ambitious $50 million robotics and artificial intelligence research effort, in collaboration with Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to develop “intelligent” rather than self-driving cars.

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.

Rather than compete with companies like Google and Tesla, which are developing cars that drive without human intervention, Toyota will focus its effort on using advances in A.I. technologies to make humans better drivers.

Dr. Pratt described the two approaches as “parallel” and “serial” autonomy. In layman terms, parallel means the machine watches what you do, while serial means it replaces you.

Toyota, the world’s largest carmaker, envisions cars of the future that will act as “guardian angels,” watching the driving behavior of humans and intervening to correct mistakes or avoid collisions when needed.

Dr. Pratt said Toyota’s goal was to keep the “human in the loop” in the car of the future and to ensure that driving remained fun. “A worry we have is that the autonomy not take away the fun in driving,” he said. “If the autonomy can avoid a wreck, it can also make it more fun to drive.”

Driver assistance technology — like pedestrian and bicyclist detection and avoidance systems, lane-departure warning and “lane keeping” systems, and software programs that alert drivers that they are becoming drowsy — have already become standard safety options from carmakers.

The Toyota program will focus on developing more artificial-intelligence-based monitoring systems. For example, in the future, an A.I. system might do more than warn drivers that they are leaving their lane and actively correct all kinds of driver errors. Another possibility might be to use A.I. technologies to permit aging drivers to continue to drive by offering driver assistance in areas like vision and reaction time.

“In parallel autonomy, there is a guardian angel or driver’s education teacher,” Dr. Pratt said. “It usually does nothing, unless you are about to do something dumb.”

Read more : https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/05/science/toyota-artificial-intelligence-car-stanford-mit.html?_r=0