Toyota Motor has recruited the staff at a small Massachusetts-based autonomous-vehicle company to work on its advanced projects, a media report said.

The move, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) said, reflects a trend among auto industry companies, including car-hailing and other fast-growing startups, to rapidly build their research and development skills by taking over small and specialised companies, or raiding a company's workforce. In cases like Toyota's, the acquisitions aren't hostile.

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Toyota hired Jaybridge Robotics' 16 employees, including software and hardware engineers, the automaker said. Jaybridge chief executive Jeremy Brown said in a news release cited by the WSJ its staff will help the automaker "reduce the nearly 1.25m traffic fatalities each year".

The report said it was unclear if Jaybridge, a seven-year-old company that spun out of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, would continue to operate. Toyota said it didn't buy the company. Jaybridge employees would become part of the Toyota Research Institute.

The WSJ noted Toyota last year pledged to spend US$1bn on artificial intelligence research, with a big focus on autonomous vehicles. TRI is run by Gill Pratt, a former MIT professor and programme manager at the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency. With the latest hirings, TRI now has about 40 employees, many of whom are graduates of MIT and Stanford University.

The Jaybridge group "brings decades of experience developing, testing, and supporting autonomous vehicle products which perfectly complements the world-class research team at TRI," Pratt said in a statement.

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