The Toyota Collaborative Safety Research Center (CSRC) has announced four new research projects focused on the safe design and implementation of future mobility applications and solutions. The University of Michigan, Miami University, University of Nebraska, Texas Transportation Institute, and State Farm will assist the CSRC with the new projects. Each entity will helm a different project to gather valuable data about the relationship between drivers and ADAS technology.
CSRC is investing $1 million in the research projects to get them off the ground.
Each project will seek to determine the feasibility of its assignment and defined objectives. Driver behavior and health are central themes of the projects, which range in scope from preventing falls on autonomous shuttles to detecting disease. The projects will also seek to identify common errors when drivers are interacting and engaging with ADAS technology. Data from each project will be shared across the institutions to help speed research, with the results being made public to support the advancement of automotive safety across the industry.
“These studies will help us better align advanced vehicle technologies with the driver’s needs and allow us to design and develop systems that are ultimately intuitive and easy for drivers to use,” said Jeff Makarewicz, group vice president, Toyota Motor North America, Advanced Mobility Research & Development. “By working with our partner institutions, and openly sharing our insights with the broader automotive, government, NGO, and technology communities, we believe we can help progress society’s acceptance of these new and promising technologies.”
CSRC Research Projects
Here is a more in-depth look at each CSRC research project.
- Project Name: Roadmanship Integrated ADAS.
- Collaborator: University of Michigan.
- Purpose: Determine how operating a motor vehicle courteously and attentively could help define ADAS and autonomous vehicle design criteria across many different situations (weather and traffic conditions, for example).
- Project Name: Investigation of Postural Response Time to Avoid a Fall.
- Collaborator: Miami University.
- Purpose: Determine if it’s possible to create an alert that would warn autonomous shuttle riders to adjust their balance or grab onto a nearby railing to better prepare for a sudden stop and thereby avoid falling.
- Project Name: Feasibility and Utility of the Car as a Platform for Indexing Driver Health and Disease.
- Collaborator: University of Nebraska.
- Purpose: Determine if it’s possible to monitor the driver in a way that would detect diseases while providing a high-level framework for sensors that would be capable of doing such a thing.
- Project Name: Identifying Deviations from Normal Driving Behavior.
- Collaborators: Texas Transportation Institute & State Farm.
- Purpose: Demonstrate the value of integrated multi-domain data (including but not limited to the vehicle type, infrastructure, driver, and crash record) in identifying driver behavior and shortcomings when utilizing ADAS technology.
Since its launch in 2011, CSRC has initiated 63 research projects with 31 partner universities, publishing more than 400 papers and presenting at multiple industry conferences.
