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Japanese carmaker Toyota has revealed it wants to build a smart car complete with artificial intelligence in the next five years.
According to the head of the company’s research institute, Toyota wants to improve car safety by creating something that can anticipate and then avoid potential accidents and dangerous situations by using artificial intelligence.
Google is already developing and testing driverless cars that run on a similar system – their cars and technology have already clocked thousands of hours of road time in California.
Toyota says it plans to spend a billion dollars (£682m) to fund the project which Gill Pratt, the head of the company’s research division, said was aiming to be like a “guardian angel” for drivers, able to anticipate any obstacles as well as plot and execute avoidance actions as needed.
Toyota also said it wanted to create a system that was able to be evasive beyond a single lane – the capacity of some current systems.
Pratt added that Toyota was also looking at the possibility of creating domestic robots in the future, ones that would be designed to help the less able around their homes.
