Toyota
partners with Stanford, MIT on self-driving car research
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[September 05, 2015]
By Paul Lienert
DETROIT (Reuters) - Toyota Motor Corp is
collaborating with two top U.S. universities on artificial intelligence
and robotics research aimed at ramping up the Japanese automaker's
efforts to develop self-driving cars.
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Toyota said on Friday that it would spend $50 million over the
next five years to establish joint research centers at both
universities, one in the heart of Silicon Valley and the other
outside Boston.
Both schools have top-tier engineering and computer science
programs, and the auto industry heavily recruits graduates of both.
Toyota has lagged behind rivals in developing self-driving cars and
implementing hands-free driver assistance systems.
U.S. electric car maker Tesla Motors Inc already is doing final
road-testing of a semi-automated hands-free system on its Model S
sedan and plans to make it available to customers later this year.
General Motors Co, Volkswagen AG <VOWG_p.DE> and Nissan Motor Co all
have announced plans to phase in hands-free systems over the next
two years.
GM has a longstanding research partnership on self-driving vehicles
with Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University. VW sponsors an
intelligent-vehicle laboratory at Stanford. And Nissan earlier this
year formed a partnership with the U.S. National Aeronautics and
Space Administration's Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley to
conduct automated vehicle research.
Toyota said it had hired Gill Pratt to direct its new research
centers. Pratt is a former program manager at the U.S. Defense
Department's DARPA research arm, which has sponsored several
self-driving vehicle challenges over the past 10 years. A team from
Stanford won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge.
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Toyota was one of the first automakers to offer an automated parking
system, on the Prius hybrid in Japan in 2003. But it has been slower
than many of its competitors in implementing more advanced
hands-free automated systems, and its executives have said the
company has no intention of building a fully automated vehicle.
(Reporting by Paul Lienert in Detroit; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn)
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