Toyota to invest $50M in car-tech research at Stanford, MIT

The financial commitment announced Friday by the Japanese automaker will be made over the next five years at joint research centers located in Silicon Valley and another technology hub in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Major tech companies such as Google and Uber are competing against a range of automakers to make robot cars that will be better drivers than people and save lives by causing fewer accidents.

Pratt, a former program manager at the U.S. government's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, suspects many people will still want to drive some of the time even when cars are fully equipped to handle the task.

If the goals are realized, Toyota might be able to build a car "that is never responsible for a collision," Rus said.

Besides working on recognition technology, the Stanford research center will try to create artificial intelligence programs that study human behavior to learn more about the decision making and reasoning that goes into driving so cars can quickly adjust to potentially dangerous situations.