Toyota Research Institute

Toyota's US-based AI and robotics research arm, an early driver of diffusion policies and large behavior models.

Toyota Research Institute is a research organization Toyota Motor Corporation established in the US in 2016, headquartered in Los Altos, California, with an additional site in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Its founding CEO was Gill Pratt, a roboticist and former DARPA program manager, and Toyota initially committed $1 billion over five years. Its focus areas include autonomous driving, materials science, and robotics. On the robotics side, TRI helped develop diffusion policy (2023, with Columbia University and others), which made generating actions with a diffusion model a mainstream technique; it later put more emphasis on large behavior models, general-purpose manipulation policies trained on large amounts of multi-task demonstrations, and in October 2024 worked with Boston Dynamics to apply one to the electric Atlas. TRI also contributed to OpenVLA and its backbone, Prismatic VLM.

ExampleIn 2025, TRI and Boston Dynamics showed a language-conditioned large behavior model controlling the electric Atlas through a multi-step tidying task.

Also called

TRI

Related

Large Behavior Model · Diffusion Policy · Boston Dynamics Atlas (Electric) · Boston Dynamics · OpenVLA · Prismatic VLMs

Sources

Toyota Research Institute - Wikipedia
TRI: AI-Powered Robot by Boston Dynamics and Toyota Research Institute

As of

2025-08