DETROIT _ The Toyota Research Institute on Wednesday committed to giving $22 million to advance research on artificial intelligence, robotics and autonomous driving at the University of Michigan.
The money will be spent over four years and the work will be directed by robotics professors Ryan Eustice and Ed Olson, both of whom will retain their part-time faculty positions.
This is the latest step in an emerging private-public effort to establish southeast Michigan and Ann Arbor, the home of the university, as a major hub for development of new modes of mobility and in-home robotics designed to help older citizens.
A year ago, Mcity, a 32-acre simulated city and facility, opened on the university's north campus, where a variety of automakers, suppliers and telecommunications companies are testing autonomous vehicle systems in a controlled environment.
Toyota, along with General Motors, Ford, Nissan and Honda, is a founding partner in the university's Mobility Transformation Center, which oversees Mcity.
Last month, the Michigan Economic Development Corp. approved a $1.2 million purchase of 311 acres in the Detroit suburb of Ypsilanti for the American Center for Mobility. Located at a former World War II bomber plant, the center will be a larger space for testing vehicles that can talk to each other and drive on their own.
The ACM and Mcity are separate from the university's partnership with Toyota.
"We look forward to collaborating with the University of Michigan's research faculty and students to develop new intelligent technologies that will help drivers travel more safely, securely and efficiently," said Gill Pratt, Toyota Research Institute CEO.
The Japanese automaker, which employs about 1,300 people in the area, most of them at a technical center just south of Ann Arbor, has budgeted $1 billion for the Toyota Research Institute. The institute also has established partnerships with Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass.
The Ann Arbor site was added in April when Toyota announced that Eustice and Olson would join the project. Both were involved with the competitive robotics challenge sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Many of the breakthroughs behind development of the earliest autonomous cars have come from the robotics challenge.
"Our labs at U-M push the envelope of what robots can sense and understand about the world," Eustice said in a statement. "The challenges TRI faces with autonomous cars will leverage our labs' research into complex behaviors such as merging and understanding the intention of other vehicles."
The university will seek proposals from faculty across departments to learn more about autonomous mobility, safety and home robotics.
