Toyota’s Collaborative Safety Research Center (CSRC) introduced nine new projects being launched as part of the next phase of its automotive safety research, backed by the new five-year, $30-million commitment announced last year. The new research projects, announced during a virtual CSRC media event showcasing safer mobility, will 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.

The new projects will engage the expertise of the University of Massachusetts – Amherst, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Iowa, Virginia Tech and Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis.

Data from each project will be published and openly presented to maximize the output from these collaborations and studies for benefiting the advancement of automotive safety industrywide. The nine projects are:

Projects are selected based on their application to CSRC’s new 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. Each project is designed to be completed in a short amount of time to emphasize agility for more rapid results.

CSRC is considering additional projects and will announce more at a later date. CSRC will also seek out new partnerships who can offer new perspectives and offer different research methods for addressing safety issues facing at-risk and vulnerable populations.

Toyota created the Collaborative Safety Research Center (CSRC) in 2011 to advance traffic safety for the industry and society through open partnerships with universities, hospitals and other institutions. CSRC has received $85 million over its first 10 years for foundational safety research, including the factors that lead to distracted driving and the development of tools and testing procedures related to the efficacy of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS).

Since its inception, CSRC has completed 85 research projects with more than 30 different institutions, published over 260 research papers and engaged more than 300 researchers, who have publicly shared the output globally.