Driverless cars create a buzz at Las Vegas electronics show

Autonomous cars are taking over the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

The Mercedes-Benz F015 concept car at the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Autonomous cars are taking over the Consumer Electronics Show. In the early days of the tech event in Las Vegas, carmakers and suppliers, such as chip maker Nvidia, have made announcements about deepening commitments to driverless vehicles.

Toyota has committed $US1 billion ($1.4bn) to an artificial intelligence company, and its leader, Gill Pratt, a robotics expert who led the most recent robotics challenge for the Defence Advanced Research Projects Administration, announced yesterday he had hired seven key researchers from DARPA as well as experts from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University and Toyota. Toyota is building a 200-person company designed to advance automated driving and other artificial intelligence.

The new company, announced weeks ago, is a big financial commitment for Toyota and may seek to commercialise other products that relate to artificial intelligence.

“We see an incredible alignment between robotics and cars,” Mr Pratt said. “We are not necessarily going to pop out a new product every year, but Toyota will have new products that come out every year and we will have an effect on that.” Toyota is to introduce an autonomous highway-driving system around 2020, but hasn’t committed to a fully autonomous vehicle usable in all conditions.

Toyota’s new team of researchers gives it an elite grouping that could help it gain ground in what has become an arms race for talent.

Ford says it plans to triple — to 30 — the number of autonomous Ford Fusion sedans it is testing as it pushes to advance the technology and is implementing a new advanced laser rangefinder from supplier Velodyne Acoustics that can be hidden in side mirrors.

General Motors has a partnership with Mobileye, a maker of a camera-based vision system for lane and object detection used in autonomous vehicles. GM may begin this year collecting real-time mapping data through customer vehicles to feed back to Mobileye to create the real-time, high-definition maps of the world required for fully autonomous driving. GM vehicles, which are connected to servers through its OnStar system, can feed information about roads and traffic back to Mobileye, which can constantly create new maps that are sent back to vehicles to help them navigate the world.