Toyota has announced the Collaborative Safety Research Center (CSRC) in Ann Arbor is entering its next phase of automotive safety projects backed by a five-year, $30-million commitment.
“Humans are at the center of Toyota’s technology development strategy, so we are designing our new safety research in pursuit of ‘Safety for All,’” says Danil Prokhorov, director of Toyota’s Future Research Department (FRD) and CSRC.
“As part of this, our projects will explore the diversity of safety needs and analyze safe mobility options that accommodate different applications, physical characteristics and levels of accessibility for people and society.”
The center, located at Toyota’s Technical Center in Ann Arbor, has received $85 million over the last 10 years to help make roads a safer place for everyone. The projects have ranged from foundational research into the factors that lead to distracted driving to development of tools and testing procedures related to the efficacy of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS).
Throughout its history, CSRC has partnered with leading institutions and experts from organizations such as the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Michigan among others.
CSRC has identified three new research tracks to guide its work over the next five years. This will ensure the work done at the center evolves to the emerging challenges of the changing mobility ecosystem.
The three interrelated tracks weave together the diverse interdisciplinary backgrounds of CSRC’s team, emphasizing agility, shorter project lengths and more rapid results:
- Human-centric: Helping everyone understand, benefit from, and interact with the mobility technologies of today and tomorrow. Example areas include new technology training and customer health and wellness.
- Safety assurance: Enhancing the safe operation of future mobility technologies, especially automated driving systems, by studying the traffic environment, human drivers, and possible safety hazards. Examples include deeper understanding of interactions between road users as well as driver engagement in automation.
- Assessment: Empowering the decisions of individual customers and industry stakeholders by identifying quantitative mobility safety measures. Examples include new crash protection measures and repeatable test scenarios for new driver assistance and automated features.
Since its inception, CSRC has completed 85 research projects with more than 25 institutions, published more than 260 research papers, and engaged more than 300 researchers who have shared the output globally. It will continue to seek out partnerships to address safety issues facing at-risk and vulnerable populations.
 in Ann Arbor will receive $30 million over five years.){kind=link}