Toyota Launches 11 Autonomous, Connected Car Initiatives

Toyota Motor Corp.'s Collaborative Safety Research Center (CSRC) is launching 11 new research programs related to emerging vehicle technologies.

The projects, conducted in partnership with eight research institutions in North America, will focus on the impact of advanced technology on road safety trends and the interaction between humans and machines. Specific topics include the integration of active and passive systems, such as human experience design for advanced technology vehicles, driver state detection and using analytics to help improve the study of naturalistic driving data.

The subject of the 11 research programs are:

• Motion and muscle activation of young volunteers in evasive vehicle maneuvers
• Estimating the overall benefit of active/passive systems
• Passenger dynamics during crash avoidance maneuvers
• Developing an in-vehicle emergency medical condition detection system
• Assessing the benefit of adaptive headlamps
• A study of transitions in automated driving
• Developing a road departure test method
• Analyzing the “language” of driver-to-driver communication
• Technologies for recognizing and measuring a vehicle’s surround environment
• Enhancing social interaction among drivers
• A holistic approach to perceiving and measuring human-centered automated driving

The projects are the first launched under CSRC Next, the Center's new five-year program that began in January. Toyota is investing $35 million the research, which the carmaker will conduct with its partners to help accelerate the development of autonomous and connected driving technologies and services.

Since its launch in 2011, CSRC has completed 44 research projects with 23 partner universities and published more than 200 papers.