CES 2016: Toyota building billion-dollar AI and robotics lab
Japanese firm says it’s working on a car that’s incapable of being crashed, spending millions on robotics and AIToyota has followed in the tyre tracks of Swedish car maker Volvo by announcing that it is working on the uncrashable car in a bid to eradicate death and injuries caused by accidents.
Putting its money where its mouth is, it arrived at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas to announce that it would spend more than $1.4 billion over the next five years in artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics research and development that will fund 30 projects at two new US-based facilities.
Toyota is teaming up with Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Sanford in Palo Alto, California, for the project. Funding will help it catch up, the Japanese car maker hopes, with the likes of Google, which is developing its own autonomous driving technology.
Some of the scientists now working with Toyota include leading lights in both AI and robotics fields, poached from the likes of Google, MIT, Walt Disney’s R&D arm and the US military.
Head of Toyota’s Research Institute, Dr Gill Pratt said that it was now the car maker’s mission to “increase access to cars to those who cannot drive”, hinting that the manufacturer might one day offer driverless alternatives to taxis.
Toyota is convinced that what it calls ‘machine learning’ is crucial for the real breakthrough in autonomous driving.
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