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.”