The Toyota Motor Corporation announced on Friday an ambitious $50 million robotics and artificial intelligence research effort, in collaboration with Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to develop “intelligent” rather than self-driving cars.
The
distinction is a significant one, according to Gill Pratt, a prominent
American roboticist, who has left his position at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Pentagon to direct the new effort.
Rather
than compete with companies like Google and Tesla, which are designing
cars that drive without human intervention, Toyota will focus its effort
on using advances in A.I. technologies to make humans better drivers.
Dr.
Pratt described the two approaches as “parallel” and “serial” autonomy.
In layman terms, parallel means the machine watches what you do, while
serial means it replaces you.
Toyota,
the world’s largest carmaker, envisions cars of the future that will
act as “guardian angels,” watching the driving behavior of humans and
intervening to correct mistakes or avoid collisions when needed.
Dr.
Pratt said Toyota’s goal was to keep the “human in the loop” in the car
of the future and to ensure that driving remained fun. “A worry we have
is that the autonomy not take away the fun in driving,” he said. “If
the autonomy can avoid a wreck, it can also make it more fun to drive.”
Driver
assistance technology — like pedestrian and bicyclist detection and
avoidance systems, lane-departure warning and “lane keeping” systems,
and software programs that alert drivers that they are becoming drowsy —
have already become standard safety options from carmakers.
The
Toyota program will focus on developing more
artificial-intelligence-based monitoring systems. For example, in the
future, an A.I. system might do more than warn drivers that they are
leaving their lane and actively correct all kinds of driver errors.
Another possibility might be to use A.I. technologies to permit aging
drivers to continue to drive by offering driver assistance in areas like
vision and reaction time.
“In
parallel autonomy, there is a guardian angel or driver’s education
teacher,” Dr. Pratt said. “It usually does nothing, unless you are about
to do something dumb.”
Before
joining Toyota, Dr. Pratt served as a Darpa program manager. Beginning
in 2012, he oversaw a “Grand Challenge” contest there to design
semiautonomous mobile robots capable of performing useful tasks in
disaster areas where humans would be at risk, such as the Fukushima
nuclear power plant disaster.
The
contest was won earlier this year by a South Korean-designed robot that
performed a series of tasks like driving, walking, opening doors, using
power tools and climbing stairs. Twenty-three teams participated in the
contest. However, it provided a striking contrast to science fiction
movie portrayals of robots as superhuman machines that operate with
agility, dexterity and speed.
During
the contest, the robots exhibited little autonomy, moved glacially and
often fell while doing tasks that are routinely performed by human
toddlers.
Toyota
will finance researchers at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence
Laboratory and the M.I.T. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence
Laboratory to undertake a five-year project to make advances in both
automotive transportation and indoor mobile robotics that might have
applications in new markets like elder care.
Around
the globe, human populations are aging in the more advanced countries,
Dr. Pratt noted. This is raising what economists call the “dependency
ratio,” a measure of the number of those in the work force compared to
both young and old dependents. In the United States, the dependency
ratio is expected to increase 52 percent in the next 15 years, while in
Japan it is expected to increase 100 percent.
The
development of intelligent transportation technologies and
elder-care-related robots holds the promise of giving the aging more
independence, he said.
“I
had to take the car keys from my dad,” he said, arguing that losing
independence is “also an awful way for a parent to live. Most retired
people want independence in a human sense. Let’s use robotics to let
people live in more human way.”
By
financing the Stanford and M.I.T. artificial intelligence laboratories,
Toyota is tapping into talent and experience in technologies that have
recently made dramatic progress in perception, dexterity and autonomous
motion. The two laboratories were founded by the artificial intelligence
pioneers John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky in the 1960s and have produced
basic innovations in artificial intelligence and robotics, as well as
educated multiple generations of researchers.
Currently,
Fei Fei Li, a computer scientist who is a specialist in machine vision,
leads the Stanford laboratory, and the M.I.T. laboratory is led by
Daniela Rus, a roboticist who has worked in new areas such as
distributed and collaborative robotics.
“I
see why Toyota wants to do this,” said Dr. Li. “It is the biggest
carmaker in the world, and it wants to influence the next generation.”
The
research will concentrate on keeping “the human in the loop,” which is a
break from the direction of much A.I. research, which has focused on
building systems and machines that replace humans.
“We see this as basic computer science, A.I. and robotics that will make a difference in transportation,” said Dr. Rus.
Dr.
Pratt acknowledged that as a teenager, he had a passion for cars. “I
had six cars, and Toyotas were the cars I loved to fix myself,” he said.
end quote from:
| New York Times | - |
Toyota will finance
researchers at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the
M.I.T. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory to
undertake a five-year project to make advances in both automotive
transportation and indoor ...
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