Toyota Research Institute Pushes Towards Autonomous Future
Toyota Research Institute Founded — November 2015
In November, Toyota announced a bold new strategy for the company when it shared plans to invest a mammoth $1 billion into the newly founded Toyota Research Institute (TRI).
The institute was commissioned to address 3 specific areas related to not just automotive applications (as one would expect) but rather, artificial intelligence for life in general. Safety, Accessibility, and Robotics comprised the key focus areas for the new institute and revealed that Toyota is looking much more broadly at artificial intelligence (AI) than just autonomous driving applications — though, that is certainly on the agenda for the TRI team.
CES Update — January 2016
Toyota shared a brief update to the masterplan at CES in January 2016, where the CEO of the Institute unpacked staffing plan specifics, but more recently the company started opening up about some of the specific technologies that Toyota will be focusing on at the Institute.
The Institute was chartered around 3 “mandates” that have obvious roots in the Toyota that spawned it — though, breaking new ground with regards to the full scope of the charter. Toyota is now pursuing a holistic approach to mobility that spans the spectrum from indoor mobility for aging populations to high-speed, autonomous driving in next-generation (electric) cars.
Nvidia Conference Update — April 2016
Most recently, at the Nvidia Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) Technology Conference, Toyota shared details of an integrated, always-on AI that, in the event of an imminent crash, would actively intervene for the driver to prevent an accident.
This shows that Toyota is not sitting idle at the Institute, but that it is leveraging all of the brilliance and insights from the team to move swiftly in pursuit of delivery on its mandates. Toyota is already moving forward with testing of the solution in an indoor driving simulator that it has constructed at a facility near Mt Fuji in Japan.
At the Nvidia conference, Toyota broke news that it was spinning up a third TRI center to supplement the two centers previously announced in Palo Alto (California) working with Stanford and in Cambridge (Massachusetts) working with MIT. The new facility is to be built in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and will operate in partnership with the University of Michigan.
Gradually, leaning into autonomous technology is similar to the approach Tesla took with the first fruits of autonomous driving technology showing up in vehicles as “active safety” features. Online blog Inverse shared a quote from CEO of TRI Gill Pratt: “Our plan is to see how humans will respond when the car temporarily takes control because it knows better,” indicating that Toyota is leaning into practical applications of AI that can be used in vehicles today, not 5 or 10 years into the future.
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Toyota is taking a more conservative approach to building “production ready” autonomous driving solutions by first focusing on core safety applications of the technology and the AI that serve to protect humans in and around the car as the foundation layer of operation. This solution has been dubbed “Guardian Angel” and ensures that the autonomous driving technology is not creating any unsafe conditions. Imagine a layer of firmware that contained hard-coded safety rules that the operating system couldn’t override — that’s Guardian Angel.
Having these protections in place allows Toyota the freedom to test at two levels with a double safety net. Toyota is working to refine the rules governing Guardian Angel, whittling it down to a core set of instructions that must always be true when the vehicle is in operation. On top of that, the AI that provides the active safety interventions … and will eventually drive the car … can then be bolted on.
If the AI makes mistakes or violates some of the rules in Guardian Angel, the exceptions will be flagged and can then be analyzed to determine if the AI was correct or if something in Guardian Angel should be modified. All the while, the passenger is safe and others around the vehicle are safe, thus acting as a double safety net.
It is exciting to see Toyota making such a strong and well-financed push into AI … though it would be nice if it would drop — or at least postpone — the push for hydrogen fuel cell vehicles until it is at least as viable and efficient end to end as battery-electric vehicles are today. Until that happens, Toyota is still flaunting what it feels is an exclusive table in the penthouse of the Hydrogen Society.
Images by Kyle Field, CleanTechnica
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