Toyota Research Institute (TRI), a wholly owned subsidiary of Toyota Motor North America, has unveiled its 2.0 generation advanced safety research vehicle in Sonoma, California.

The company explained that this new test vehicle will be used to explore a full range of autonomous driving capabilities.

Since 2005, the company is reported to have been working on autonomous vehicles at its US technical center in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The company secured its first US patents in the field in 2006.

"It will learn individual driver habits and abilities and will benefit from shared intelligence from other cars as data gathering, sharing and connectivity technologies advance."

Toyota Research Institute CEO Gill Pratt said: “This new advanced safety research vehicle is the first autonomous testing platform developed entirely by TRI, and reflects the rapid progress of our autonomous driving programme."

The company explains that its test vehicle has been designed and developed on the lines of machine vision and machine learning.

The test vehicle is equipped with layered and overlapping LIDAR, radar and camera sensor array, which reduces the dependency on high-definition maps.

It is built on a current generation Lexus LS 600hL, which features a robust drive-by-wire interface.

TRI claims that its 2.0 variant has been designed on plug-and-play test platform that can be upgraded continuously and often.

Its technology stack will be used to develop both of TRI's core research paths: Chauffeur and Guardian systems.

Chauffeur refers to the fully autonomous system classified by Society of Aerospace Engineers (SAE) as unrestricted Level 5 autonomy and Level 4 restricted and geo-fenced operation.

Guardian is a high-level driver assist system, constantly monitoring the driving environment inside and outside the vehicle.

Pratt added: “Basically, it is a smart vehicle designed to get smarter over time.

"It will learn individual driver habits and abilities and will benefit from shared intelligence from other cars as data gathering, sharing and connectivity technologies advance.

“We believe Guardian can probably be deployed sooner and more widely than Chauffeur, providing high-level driver-assist features capable of helping mitigate collisions and save lives, sooner rather than later.”