Toyota Motor Corp. recently announced it will be launching this month a new company, Toyota Research Institute-Advanced Development (TRI-AD), which will focus on automated driving technology.
TRI-AD will partner with Denso Corp. and Aisin Seiki Co. to jointly develop fully-integrated, production-quality software for automated driving. The companies will invest $2.8 billion in the effort, 90 percent of which will come from Toyota.
“Building production-quality software is a critical success factor for Toyota’s automated driving program,” TRI-AD CEO James Kuffner said. “This company’s mission is to accelerate software development in a more effective and disruptive way, by augmenting the Toyota Group’s capability through the hiring of world-class software engineers. We will recruit globally, and I am thrilled to lead this effort.”
The new company has four objectives. TRI-AD aims to recruit and employ the world’s top engineers while cultivating talent within the Toyota Group, work with Toyota Group for research and advanced development, link research results to product development, and create a means to take software from research to commercialization.
TRI-AD will be located in Tokyo in Toyota’s head office and will employ 300 people.
In 2016, Toyota founded Toyota Research Institute to conduct research in automated driving, robotics, and artificial intelligence.