The University of Pennsylvania's PRECISE Center has received a substantial financial gift from the Toyota InfoTechnology Center. Toyota-ITC is interested in promoting the PRECISE Center's efforts on safety algorithms for self-driving cars, remote automotive diagnostics, resilient control of autonomous vehicles and electric vehicle architectures.  

The Toyota-ITC gift will allow Rahul Mangharam, associate professor in the School of Engineering and Applied Science’s Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering, along with other PRECISE Center researchers, to further their efforts in transportation safety.

“This generous gift will further establish Penn as a hub for future vehicle electronics and safety systems with strengthened ties to the automotive industry,” said Mangharam. "It will also allow PRECISE and Toyota-ITC teams to work more intimately to establish leadership in the formal methods foundations of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) and verification technology for autonomous vehicles."

PRECISE is an active member of the Technologies for Safe and Efficient Transportation Center, a collaborative effort with Carnegie Mellon University. In October, T-SET was selected as one of five national university transportation centers funded by the United States Department of Transportation. Penn and Carnegie Mellon were awarded a $5.65 million grant for a joint center to conduct transportation technology research and development. Since T-SET was founded in 2009, it has allowed the two universities to engage in more than 40 projects focused on deploying transportation technologies. 

The PRECISE Center also received a multidisciplinary grant of $4.8 million from the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency’s High-Assurance Cyber Military Systems Program for SPARCS: Synthesis of Platform-aware Attack-Resilient Control Systems. The project aims to develop control systems for ground vehicles that are resilient to a variety of external network, sensor and system attacks.