Toyota Working on "Guardian Angel" to be Your Co-Pilot

In late 2015 Toyota proclaimed a five-year project investing 1 billion in artificial intelligence and robotics research with the establishment of Toyota Research Institute (TRI) facilities at Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The fields of study are artificial intelligence, autonomous transportation, and mobile indoor robotics. Gil Pratt, CEO of TRI as well as an MIT alum and a former program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), laid out two tracks for autonomous vehicle research: one for "chauffeur model" wholly autonomous cars, one for "guardian angel" systems that would create more helpful, "intelligent" but traditional cars. A guardian angel, like a fearless driving instructor with a mirrored set of controls in the passenger's seat, would only take over if it determines an incident is imminent. Seen as a mid-term step ahead of the fully autonomous cars Toyota is also working on – and Google, Uber, Ford, and Volvo – the introduction of advanced AI monitoring systems could see production before self-driving cars since the human remains in charge more than 99 percent of the time.