Like several other automakers, Toyota has concentrated much of its autonomous vehicle research in Michigan, the heart of the American auto industry.
This week it announced it is expanding efforts there with a new partnership with the University of Michigan, whose faculty will get $22 million over four years from the Japanese automaker. Besides autonomous cars, the money will also go towards robotics and indoor mobility devices, like stair-climbing wheelchairs and wearable cameras that help a blind person understand his or her surroundings.
Even before the Toyota Research Institute (TRI) opened its doors last fall to build self-driving car tech, Michigan was already the site of Toyota's other artificial intelligence and robotics research. The company helped start a center at the University of Michigan that examines ways to connect cars to smart cities of the future.
The commitment to provide additional funding in this area echoes Toyota's original autonomous vehicle strategy, which was to focus exclusively on driver-assist technologies and forgo completely self-driving cars of the sort that Google and others are working on.
"The challenges that TRI faces with autonomous cars will leverage our labs' research into complex behaviors, like merging and understanding the intention of other vehicles from their actions," University of Michigan Assistant Professor Edwin Olson, who also works for TRI.
Toyota has gone back and forth on self-driving cars in the past. In 2014, the company's deputy chief safety technology officer said unequivocally that Toyota was not interested in developing driverless cars, instead focusing exclusively on driver-assist technologies. But last year, Toyota announced it would invest $1 billion in artificial intelligence and robotics, much of that for autonomous vehicle technology.
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