Toyota partners with University of Michigan in AI initiative for autonomous cars

Toyota has announced a tie-up with the University of Michigan to focus on artificial intelligence (AI) technology in autonomous cars, the third initiative under a $1-billion investment by the company. With the latest tie-up the Japanese automaker now boasts three collaborations with US universities for AI research.

The Japanese auto maker not only wants  autonomous driving vehicles, it also wants them to take over to stop drivers from crashing. The company already has a research centre in Massachusetts, where it worked with MIT, and another in Palo Alto, California, where it collaborated with Stanford University.

According to Fortune, the Toyota Research Institute (TRI) CEO Gill Pratt made the announcement on 7 April, at Nvidia's GPU Technology Conference in San Jose.

A University of Michigan professor, who is joining the new Ann Arbor centre said that one of the chief reasons for the company's new investment was that Michigan allowed extreme-limit testing in wide variety of environments. 

Meanwhile, it had been reported that car accidents caused roughly 1.2 million deaths annually. That was a problem that Toyota was trying to solve with self-driving cars and the artificial intelligence required to run them.

''We want constructive coopetition here,'' Pratt said in his keynote speech at the Nvidia GPUTech conference in San Jose, California. ''The fact that we tolerate 1.2 million people killed per year is astounding, and it's a shame. It far exceeds the number of people killed in war.''

''Because 1.2 million people per year demand nothing less,'' Pratt said. ''The future is incredibly bright for all of us working on this.''

According to Pratt, there were various levels of autonomy needed to make self-driving cars safer. One was to allow an immediate hand-off to a car when there  was an emergency that required a human driver.

Another was to give warning of perhaps 30 seconds about when a driver needed to take over, and the final level of autonomy was a complete self-driving car that handled all emergencies.