Ford unveiled its automated Ford Fusion Hybrid research vehicle last month, a technology-packed vehicle intended to help pave the way toward autonomous driving. Now Ford is expanding its research efforts with the high-tech Fusion through new collaborations with Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University. This work will support Ford’s Blueprint for Mobility, which envisions a future of autonomous functionality in the years ahead.

While the automated Fusion Hybrid research vehicle uses many of the same technologies already found in the standard model, it also adds such high-tech features as four LiDAR sensors to generate a real-time 3D map of the car’s surrounding environment. Research with MIT will use advanced algorithms to help predict where moving vehicles and pedestrians could be in the future, thus providing a better sense of surrounding risks and enabling the vehicle to plan a path to avoid these risks. Ford’s work with Stanford will explore how the car’s sensors could see around obstacles. The goal of its multi-faceted collaborative work, Ford says, is to provide automated vehicles with ‘common sense.’