Gill Pratt Moves from DARPA Robotics Challenge To Help Toyota Push Self Driving Cars and Robots Forward

Robotics  

Toyota has announced that it has hired Gill Pratt to head its autonomous car and robotics research. Pratt is known for spearheading the DARPA Robotics Challenge. The company is also investing $50 million in artificial intelligence and robotics research over the next five years in partnership with MIT and Stanford.

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Toyota has announced the first step of what is expected to be a major push into artificial intelligence and robotics, technologies that the company sees as critical for addressing current and future societal challenges.

The world’s largest automaker by sales, says it will establish two collaborative research centers at MIT and Stanford University, with an investment of $50 million over the next five years. The initial focus will be on accelerating the development of AI with applications to smarter and safer vehicles, as well as robots that can make our lives better at home, especially as we age.

Toyota’s work on autonomous vehicles and advanced driving support systems has been developing for many years.  The company, like Honda, has initiated a lot of work on  robots for industrial use since the 1970s, and for Partner and Human Support Robot applications since the 2000s (see video below).

This collaborative effort will open up new avenues for systems and product development across a broader range of mobility applications.

"Our long-term goal is to make a car that is never responsible for a crash"

The initial strategy for Toyota is to work on 'assistive autonomy' for vehicles.  This is not self driving like Google and others are pursuing, but having the driver active most of the time, with the vehicle continuously sensing and interpreting the environment around, and ready to step in as soon as it detects a dangerous situation. Toyota believes this approach could make cars virtually crash-proof.

“Our long-term goal is to make a car that is never responsible for a crash,” says Dr. Gill Pratt, who was until just a few months ago the program manager at DARPA responsible for the DARPA Robotics Challenge and will now direct this research at Toyota. He added that such smart cars will “allow older people to be able to drive, and help prevent the one and a half million deaths that occur as a result of cars every single year around the world.”

Pratt will be working with Professor Daniela Rus, head of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), as well as Professor Fei-Fei Li, director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL).

Pratt will be overseeing the overall collaborative effort at the research centers, to “direct and accelerate these research activities and [their] application to intelligent vehicles and robotics.”

Toyota isn’t yet ready to comment on what its entire robotics effort will consist of, but we’ve been assured that this is just the first move, according to IEEE Spectrum, "We’re expecting big things."

SOURCE  Toyota

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