Ann Arbor, Michigan — Toyota’s Michigan-based Collaborative Safety Research Center (CSRC) announced last week that a trifecta of research projects have been added to the docket for the Japanese OEM and a number of its educational partners.
Toyota, alongside a diverse team of experts and researchers from the University of Michigan, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Touchstone Evaluations, Inc., will be heading up three ADAS related projects over the next several years.
In one such project, the automaker intends to collaborate with MIT’s AgeLab, a research program dedicated to improving quality of life for older people, to establish metrics and evaluate the benefits of automated lane centring technology.
Toyota says it will use real-world data from volunteer drivers to analyze the advantages to lane centring functions, so as to continually improve its performance down the line.
The University of Michigan’s Transport Research Institute will take the lead on another project relating to the development of a “risky driving countermeasure” system. Researchers will work to develop prototype in-vehicle interventions to encourage safe driving behaviour, according to Toyota’s press release.
Finally, the driver safety experts at Touchstone Evaluations will work with Toyota to develop risk profiles to quantify relationships between a driver’s personality and risky driving practices like speeding, tailgating and phone-use. Toyota says the data gathered from these profiles may come to inform certain pieces of driver safety technology going forward.
“Our new research projects exemplify CSRC’s dedication to our mission of improving safety in the automotive industry,” said director of the CSRC Danil Prokhorov.
“By collaborating with researchers to study real-world problems related to mobility technologies, we aim to develop enhanced engineering tools and empower drivers to maximize the potential of advanced technologies.”
With the addition of these three projects, Toyota says it currently has 98 research projects in the works, with more than 30 institutions actively lending their support.
