Toyota Research Institute-Advanced Development (TRI-AD)

2018: Creation

At the beginning of March, 2018 the Japanese auto giant Toyota announced creation of new division which will focus on development of unmanned vehicles. The structure received the name Toyota Research Institute-Advanced Development (TRI-AD).

Her employees will create "the software, completely integrated, suitable for production application, for pilotless driving", said in the statement of Toyota.

Toyota unmanned vehicle

Invest 300 billion yens (about $2.8 billion) in the created division. Aisin Seiki companies (releases the equipment for assembly of cars) and Denso (the producer of component parts for motor transport), which received 5% of the enterprise became partners of Toyota in this project.

It is supposed that TRI-AD will allow to accelerate development of the systems of an auto pilot by Toyota company with higher levels of autonomy, including the fifth at which the car will be able to move on public roads absolutely independently, i.e. without any intervention from the person.

The head office TRI-AD is located in Tokyo. Number of staff will be about 1000 people. James Kuffner, the technical director of the Toyota Research Institute research company which is based in the USA is appointed the head of TRI-AD. In the statement it is specified that English will be the main business language of new structure.

Toyota for a long time is engaged in creation of self-governed machines. Within this development about $1 billion were invested in artificial intelligence and other adjacent technologies which can find application in machines. Besides, the Japanese corporation agreed about technology cooperation with Microsoft and Uber.

At the beginning of 2018 Toyota announced the robomobile constructed based on the hybrid Lexus LS 600hL sedan.^[1]

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