Toyota ambitious to develop AI – based system to advance vehicle safety within five years

In the next five years Toyota Motor Corporation plans to develop driver assistance systems with artificial intelligence (AI), all towards improving vehicle safety. CEO of Toyota Research Institute (TRI), Gill Pratt, said that their goal is to improve car safety by allowing vehicles to expect and avoid possible accidents.

“Some of the things that are in car safety, which is a near-term priority, I’m very confident that we will have some advances come out during the next five years”, said Gill Pratt CEO of Toyota Research Institute to Reuters.

Toyota said that they will spend $1 billion on this project in the next five years as the competition to develop self-driving cars becomes fierce.

Toyota, which makes the Prius hybrid, Camry sedan and luxury Lexus models already, is using refined robotic arms in their production.

The idea of enabling vehicles to think and take control from drivers makes a key platform of Toyota’s work to produce the kind of car that drives automatically on highways till the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

Right now, driver’s assistance system uses image sensors to prevent obstacles.

“The intelligence of the car would figure out a plan for evasive action … Essentially (it would) be like a guardian angel, pushing on the accelerators, pushing on the steering wheel, pushing on the brake in parallel with you.”

Pratt says that there is a possibility in the future for Toyota to make robots able to help the elderly. TRI is also exploring the idea of domestic robots as he said.