Toyota Motor Corp. is expanding its artificial intelligence research to University of Michigan, its third university collaboration in the U.S. to try to advance its efforts in autonomous driving.

Last year Toyota announced a $1 billion effort to expand its research in autonomous driving and has hired professors from Stanford University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It also brought on the entire staff of Jaybridge Robotics in Cambridge. The latest partnership includes the hiring of UM researchers Ed Olson and Ryan Eustice, autonomous vehicle experts at the Ann Arbor-based school.

With the recruitment of Messrs. Olson and Eustice, Toyota has taken a new approach to getting the people it needs in this emerging area of the tech economy. It has offered the researchers a chance to split their time between the university and the auto maker throughout the year. This hybrid hiring approach allows the company to obtain scarce talent without savaging the universities that are doing basic research.

Last year, Uber Technologies Inc. hired away 40 researchers and engineers from Carnegie Mellon University to help launch a new research center in Pittsburgh. The mass raid left the school scrambling. Since then, however, Carnegie Mellon University has tried to change the way it offers positions to professors, allowing them to leave for business and come back.

Gill Pratt, the director of the Toyota Research Institute who was hired from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency last year, said in an interview the institute is focused on having a close relationship with the universities.

"We are trying very much to have a synergistic relationship with academia," Mr. Pratt said.

Toyota said it is working on fully autonomous and partially autonomous vehicles. The UM campus will be responsible for fully autonomous cars, the Stanford campus will be working on partially autonomous and the MIT campus will work on machine learning.

Mr. Pratt made the announcement Thursday at a tech conference in San Jose sponsored by chip maker Nvidia Corp.

Write to Mike Ramsey at michael.ramsey@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

April 07, 2016 15:45 ET (19:45 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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