With the aim of improving vehicle safety, driver assistance systems that integrate artificial intelligence (AI) would be developed in the next five years by Toyota Motor Corp is targeting, said the head of its advanced research division.

Toyota aims to improve car safety by enabling vehicles to anticipate and avoid potential accident situations said Gill Pratt, CEO of recently set up Toyota Research Institute (TRI), the Japanese automaker’s research and development company that focuses on AI.

Even as the global competition among both car makers and some IT companies intensifies over the development of self-driving cars, Toyota has said the institute will spend $1 billion over the next five years.

The race among the other global automakers which are investing in robotics research, including Ford and Volkswagen AG was recently joined by Toyota’s home rival Honda Motor Co after it announced that it was setting up a new research body which would focus on artificial intelligence.

“Some of the things that are in car safety, which is a near-term priority, I’m very confident that we will have some advances come out during the next five years,” Pratt told reporters late last week in comments embargoed for Monday.

A key platform of Toyota’s efforts to produce a car which can drive automatically on highways by the 2020 Tokyo Olympics is based on the concept of allowing vehicles to think, act and take some control from drivers to perform evasive maneuvers.

Pratt said TRI was looking at AI solutions to enable “the car to be evasive beyond the one lane” while at present the research and development work and those that are under active experimentation on cars are driver assistance systems that largely use image sensors to avoid obstacles including vehicles and pedestrians within the car’s lane.

“The intelligence of the car would figure out a plan for evasive action … Essentially (it would) be like a guardian angel, pushing on the accelerators, pushing on the steering wheel, pushing on the brake in parallel with you,” Pratt said.

The Japanese automakers are grappling with a rapidly graying society, which puts future demand for private vehicle ownership at risk even as such companies race against technology companies to develop automated vehicles.

The possibility that Toyota may one day become a maker of robots to help the elderly was viewed as a reality according to Pratt.

“That’s part of what we’re exploring at TRI,” he said when he was asked of the potential for Toyota to produce robots for use in the home.

When he was questioned about media reports that Toyota is in talks with Google’s parent company Alphabet to acquire Boston Dynamics and Schafts, Pratt declined to make any comments on the issue. Both the companies – Boston Dynamics and Schafts, are robotics divisions of the technology company.

(Adapted from Reuters)