Toyota's Collaborative Safety Research Center (CSRC) has announced that four additional research projects are being added to the next phase of its pioneering automotive safety research.
According to the statement issued by Toyota, the projects include a study of human diversity in injury biomechanics, a look at technologies that can help prevent impaired drivers from endangering themselves or others, how to help predict when a driver is at risk of incapacitation or illness before it becomes an emergency and how to more effectively pass the operation of the vehicle between the driver and automation.
These new projects join the nine announced in April as part of a five-year, $30 million commitment to examine the diversity of safety needs and analyze safe mobility options that accommodate a variety of applications, physical characteristics and levels of accessibility for people and society.
Danil Prokhorov, Director of Toyota's CSRC and Future Research Department (FRD), said, 'As we continue to pursue the needs of industry around automotive safety, these new projects will help us better understand human driving behaviour, ways to integrate medical technology and crash protection for a diverse population of physical characteristics.'
CSRC will continue collaborating with the University of Virginia, University of Michigan Medical School, University of California San Diego, University of Nebraska Medical Center, Iowa State University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison through these new projects. Safety improvements found in these projects will be publicly available to help push the safety forward industrywide.
Projects are identified based on their application to CSRC's proposed research tracks for the next five-year period – Human-Centric, Safety Assurance and Assessment – which weave together the diverse interdisciplinary backgrounds of CSRC's team.On top of the multi-year projects announced now and in April, CSRC has announced its pursuit of smaller research investigations to explore potential new topics and collaborator relationships. The investigations enable CSRC to explore contributions to current and emerging safety issues for future project planning.
The investigation topics include differences in risky driving behaviour across cultures, relationships between child passengers and crash trends and differences in safety perceptions across socioeconomic groups. By working with researchers on these topics early on, CSRC is laying the foundation for future breakthroughs in these and other areas of growing importance. CSRC welcomes continued scientific discussion on these and other potential topics for early investigations.