Toyota interesting name up11 Oct 2018 01:34
Lots of interesting interviews
At Toyota, Eustice leads a team developing a sensor-rich car built around artificial intelligence. Like many companies around the world, part of the team’s research is focused on what they call “chauffeur mode” — where the human is the passenger and the car is fully capable to drive itself.
But according to Eustice, this kind of automation has multiple applications. “We are working on a technology stack that gets us to a full automation scenario, but at the same time we see a tremendous opportunity to use that technology in a different way,” says Eustice. “Fundamentally, we want to build an un-crashable car.”
With fully autonomous vehicles, the human has to be somewhat alert since the car is unable to handle all individually rare but collectively common scenarios that happen in day-to-day driving — a mattress flipping off a car in front of you, or a crossing guard motioning for you to stop, for example. In those situations, human drivers need to remain alert in the event they have to take over steering control. Humans are expected to watch the AI.
But Eustice and his team are developing technologies that flip that equation. “With ‘guardian mode’ we say, ‘Well let’s imagine a system where we have AI guard the human,’” Eustice explains. It’s a subtle change but has profound ramifications that can augment the human driver.
Eustice and his team have outfitted test cars with 360-degree sensing around the vehicle, using similar technologies he worked with as a graduate student at MIT. But instead of mapping oceanic environments, he now has one particularly lofty ambition, “to develop a car that is incapable of causing a crash.”
Sign In
Follow the stocks
