Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and Argo AI have announced a five-year, $15 million sponsored research partnership that will result in Argo AI funding research into advanced perception and next-generation decision-making algorithms for autonomous vehicles.

CMU and Argo AI will establish the Carnegie Mellon University Argo AI Center for autonomous vehicle research. Through advanced research projects, the center will seek to help overcome the hurdles associated with enabling self-driving vehicles to operate in various real-world conditions.

“We are thrilled to deepen our partnership with Argo AI to shape the future of self-driving technologies,” says CMU President Farnam Jahanian.

“Together, Argo AI and CMU will accelerate critical research in autonomous vehicles while building on the momentum of CMU's culture of innovation.”

The principal investigator for the center will be Deva Ramanan, an associate professor in CMU’s Robotics Institute, who also serves as machine learning lead at Argo AI. The Robotics Institute will serve as the location where research is conducted. Faculty members and students throughout CMU will participate in the research.

Through the center, students will have access to a variety of things, including fleet-scale data sets, vehicles and large-scale infrastructure that are key to the advancement of self-driving technologies, and would otherwise be difficult to obtain.

The research will address several technical topics including smart sensor fusion, 3D scene understanding, and behavioral prediction. Research findings will be reported in open scientific literature, and the entire field will be able to use it.

With more than 30 years’ experience in developing autonomous driving technology, CMU’s expertise and its graduates have attracted several self-driving car companies to establish operations in Pittsburgh. Argo AI was founded by a team of CMU alumni and experts from across the industry in 2016. 

“Argo AI, Pittsburgh and the entire autonomous vehicle industry have benefited from Carnegie Mellon's leadership,” says Bryan Salesky, CEO and co-founder of Argo AI.

“CMU and now Argo AI are two big reasons why Pittsburgh will remain the center of the universe for self-driving technology.”