Torc Robotics announced Tuesday a new partnership with Mila — the Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute — becoming the only autonomous trucking company to join the institute. Torc is a subsidiary of Daimler Truck AG and, as part of the partnership, will gain access to one of the world’s leading centers advancing machine learning research.
The collaboration also opens access to top-tier academic talent, including students, researchers and faculty. The partnership includes dedicated research space on site and is designed to build on Torc’s existing AI and autonomy research.
“We are excited to welcome Torc as an industry partner, as it becomes an even stronger component of Mila’s ecosystem,” said Christopher Pal, core academic member at Mila, scientific co-director of IVADO and professor at Polytechnique Montréal. “This partnership brings together academic excellence and real-world deployment, creating opportunities for our students and researchers to work on impactful challenges in physical AI while advancing the state of the art in autonomous systems.”
Mila has an alumni network of AI talent who have gone on to leadership roles at companies like Google and OpenAI. Torc will deepen its research into areas including generative world models, multi-agent behavior modeling, reinforcement learning, and foundation models for physical AI systems, the company said.
“Torc is focused on building safe, scalable autonomous trucks, and advancing the next generation of physical AI is central to that mission,” said Felix Heide, head of artificial intelligence at Torc. “As a long-time Mila collaborator, I can definitively say that partnering enables deeper collaboration at the intersection of research and real-world deployment, collaboration that supports continued progress toward commercializing autonomous trucking at scale.”
Torc is not new to Montreal and Canada, having had an affiliation with Mila since 2020.
“As autonomous vehicle technology becomes closer to a reality, it is exciting and important to see new collaborations between academic labs and top tier companies that are bringing the technology to market,” said Liam Paull, core academic member at Mila, a Canada CIFAR AI chair and associate professor at Université de Montréal, where he co-leads the Montréal Robotics and Embodied AI Lab (REAL).
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