Toyota Decides to Spend $50 Million in an Effort to Develop Self-driving Cars

MANILA: Over one million people die every year in fatal road accidents that are easily preventable. Automakers around the world are engrossed in developing technologies and next-generation systems that will make driving much safer and efficient. Toyota is next-in-line to step forward in this mission of 'no more crashes and no more life loss' to these preventable human uncertainties. Yesterday, at Silicon Valley the Japanese car maker announced its plan to invest $50 million in order to establish joint artificial research centres.

These research centres will be operational at Stanford University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology and will be work over a period a brief period of five years. The focus will be on developing cars that can learn from the drivers and systems that can step-in when it feels that the driver is losing control, thus saving some precious lives. Further both universities feed on some best talents in engineering and computer science fields, making the entire process smoother and promising.

In addition, Toyota has chosen the renowned US DARPA program manager Gill Pratt, to guide the entire lab process in both the centres. Pratt has been part of several self-driving vehicle challenges over the period of past 10 years and thus forms the perfect coordinator for this cutting-edge research work. Professor Daniela Rus from MIT and Stanford associate professor Fei-Fei Li will work with Toyota to use computer visions, machine learning and large-scale data analysis to enable cars to deal with distracted drivers, navigate through heavy traffic and take on the vehicle when the driver fall asleep.

This project is not an easy one as it will go beyond the normal GPS coordinator, self-parking and the one that sense impending crashes. Creating an artificial intelligence system means creating a self-learning system that constantly learn and is efficient to make calculative decisions when needed.

But, if the above content pleases you, stop and read further. Many car makers have already started high-end research work in this field and it seems Toyota doesn't want to lag behind. From General Motors to Volkswagen, Nissan to GM all are working and have announced future launches of their end products. Elon Musk forms an important part of the above-mentioned party with his Model S.

So, it seems that our conventional automakers are fast pacing up to give an eye to eye competition to newbies of the auto industry, and yes you guessed it right we are talking about Google and Apple.

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