“The MIT AgeLab will build and analyze new deep-learning-based perception and motion planning technologies for automated vehicles in partnership with the Toyota Collaborative Safety Research Center (CSRC). The new research initiative, called CSRC Next, is part of a five-year-old ongoing relationship with Toyota. The first phase of projects with Toyota CSRC has been led by Bryan Reimer, a research scientist at MIT AgeLab, which is part of the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics. Reimer manages a multidisciplinary team of researchers, and students focused on understanding how drivers respond to the increasing complexity of the modern operating environment. He and his team studied the demands of modern in-vehicle voice interfaces and found that they draw drivers’ eyes away from the road to a greater degree than expected, and that the demands of these interfaces need to be considered in the time course optimization of systems. Reimer’s study eventually contributed to the redesign of the instrumentation of the current Toyota Corolla and the forthcoming 2018 Toyota Camry. (Read more in the 2017 Toyota CSRC report.) Reimer and his team are also building and developing prototypes of hardware and software systems that can be integrated into cars in order to detect everything about the state of the driver and the external environment. These prototypes are designed to work both with cars with minimal levels of autonomy and with cars that are fully autonomous. Computer scientist and team member Lex Fridman is leading a group of seven computer engineers who are working on computer vision, deep learning, and planning algorithms for semi-autonomous vehicles. The application of deep learning is being used for understanding both the world around the car and human behavior inside it.”