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Gill Pratt is leaving his position at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to direct Toyota’s artificial intelligence effort.Credit Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

The Toyota Motor Corporation announced on Friday an ambitious $50 million robotics and artificial intelligence research effort, in collaboration with Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to develop “intelligent” rather than self-driving cars.

The distinction is a significant one, according to Gill Pratt, a prominent American roboticist, who has left his position at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Pentagon to direct the new effort.

Rather than compete with companies like Google and Tesla, which are developing cars that drive without human intervention, Toyota will focus its effort on using advances in A.I. technologies to make humans better drivers.

Dr. Pratt described the two approaches as “parallel” and “serial” autonomy. In layman terms, parallel means the machine watches what you do, while serial means it replaces you.

Toyota, the world’s largest carmaker, envisions cars of the future that will act as “guardian angels,” watching the driving behavior of humans and intervening to correct mistakes or avoid collisions when needed.

Dr. Pratt said Toyota’s goal was to keep the “human in the loop” in the car of the future and to ensure that driving remained fun. “A worry we have is that the autonomy not take away the fun in driving,” he said. “If the autonomy can avoid a wreck, it can also make it more fun to drive.”

Driver assistance technology — like pedestrian and bicyclist detection and avoidance systems, lane-departure warning and “lane keeping” systems, and software programs that alert drivers that they are becoming drowsy — have already become standard safety options from carmakers.

The Toyota program will focus on developing more artificial-intelligence-based monitoring systems. For example, in the future, an A.I. system might do more than warn drivers that they are leaving their lane and actively correct all kinds of driver errors. Another possibility might be to use A.I. technologies to permit aging drivers to continue to drive by offering driver assistance in areas like vision and reaction time.

“In parallel autonomy, there is a guardian angel or driver’s education teacher,” Dr. Pratt said. “It usually does nothing, unless you are about to do something dumb.”

Before joining Toyota, Dr. Pratt served as a Darpa program manager. Beginning in 2012, he oversaw a “Grand Challenge” contest there to design semiautonomous mobile robots capable of performing useful tasks in disaster areas where humans would be at risk, such as the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster.

The contest was won earlier this year by a South Korean-designed robot that performed a series of tasks like driving, walking, opening doors, using power tools and climbing stairs. Twenty-three teams participated in the contest. However, it provided a striking contrast to science fiction movie portrayals of robots as superhuman machines that operate with agility, dexterity and speed.

During the contest, the robots exhibited little autonomy, moved glacially and often fell while doing tasks that are routinely performed by human toddlers.

Toyota will finance researchers at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the M.I.T. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory to undertake a five-year project to make advances in both automotive transportation and indoor mobile robotics that might have applications in new markets like elder care.

Around the globe, human populations are aging in the more advanced countries, Dr. Pratt noted. This is raising what economists call the “dependency ratio,” a measure of the number of those in the work force compared to both young and old dependents. In the United States, the dependency ratio is expected to increase 52 percent in the next 15 years, while in Japan it is expected to increase 100 percent.

The development of intelligent transportation technologies and elder-care-related robots holds the promise of giving the aging more independence, he said.

“I had to take the car keys from my dad,” he said, arguing that losing independence is “also an awful way for a parent to live. Most retired people want independence in a human sense. Let’s use robotics to let people live in more human way.”

By financing the Stanford and M.I.T. artificial intelligence laboratories, Toyota is tapping into talent and experience in technologies that have recently made significant progress in perception, dexterity and autonomous motion. The two laboratories were founded by the artificial intelligence pioneers John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky in the 1960s and have produced basic innovations in artificial intelligence and robotics, as well as educated multiple generations of researchers.

Currently, Fei Fei Li, a computer scientist who is a specialist in machine vision, leads the Stanford laboratory, and the M.I.T. laboratory is led by Daniela Rus, a roboticist who has worked in new areas such as distributed and collaborative robotics.

“I see why Toyota wants to do this,” said Dr. Li. “It is the biggest carmaker in the world, and it wants to influence the next generation.”

The research will concentrate on keeping “the human in the loop,” which is a break from the direction of much A.I. research, which has focused on building systems and machines that replace humans.

“We see this as basic computer science, A.I. and robotics that will make a difference in transportation,” said Dr. Rus.

Dr. Pratt acknowledged that as a teenager, he had a passion for cars. “I had six cars, and Toyotas were the cars I loved to fix myself,” he said.