Autonomous Car Masterminds Converge at Google
Stanford University Professor Sebastian Thrun led the team that built Stanley which won the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2005. Two years later, Christopher Urmson of Carnegie Mellon University was the team leader of the group that made Boss that won the DARPA Urban Challenge. And there’s Anthony Levandowski who had the robotic motorcycle in the first Grand Challenge and then went on to develop the unmanned Prius (Pribot) that drove on public roads to deliver pizza.
So how in the world did all three of them get together to develop the Google Car?
GetRobo sat down with the three of them to find out. Here is an edited transcript of a very informative conversation. (This interview took place on Oct. 28, originally for a column on the Wall Street Journal Japan. )
(Photo: From left, Sebastian, Anthony and Chris with the self-driving Prius at Google)
Q. When and how did this project come about?
S) It started about one and a half years ago here at Google. There was a general awareness of the topic of self-driving cars that came with the Grand Challenges. The Grand Challenges set the stage to communicate to the world, including Google, that there is some interesting technology that may be worth nurturing.
Anthony and I had been working on Street View and that really helped Google as a company build up the next technology and scale up the operation. So there was a general level of trust between Anthony and me and Google as a company. And the key moment was when we got together to discuss what the fundamental things that can shape the 21st century are. What are the big technological innovations that might not feel like immediate business tomorrow morning but where a company like Google should really place a bet on? Google’s mission is really to advance the technology for the better of humankind and (self-driving cars) fit that vision somehow. So the Google leadership basically decided that this is worthwhile to place a bet on and to push it with a sizeable but still a modest investment - good enough to really understand that this technology has potential.
And I like this because it really allowed us to bring together a set of people and a team and a operating procedure which was not possible at the same scale at an academic institution. So I would claim the progress that took place in the last 18 months at Google dwarfs the progress that took in my own lab.
Q. I read that there are 15 people on your team. How many of you are from universities?
C) There’s Sebastian, me and James Kuffner (who left his position as associate professor of CMU to join Google). I am on a sabbatical until next June.
S) I am also on leave. My leave ends next March. Mike Montemerlo (who was the software lead on the Stanford team) now works at Google too.
Q. All three of you had your own projects. How did they all converge?
S) When the vision was set (for Google to pursue developing a self-driving car), I essentially made a couple of phone calls to the strongest engineers in the world for this kind of thing. The first person I called was Chris. The second person I didn’t have to call, because we already worked in the same office.
A) At some point we all competed, but while there is a little bit of rivalry still, we’ve really gotten along.
C) We competed in the past but we all shared a common vision in terms of where technology was going and we recognized each other’s strengths and we feel the real value in collaborating. In fact we’ve been talking since the second Grand Challenge when Sebastian’s team won about trying to find a way to work together.
Q. How did the new Google car combine the technology developed for Stanley, Boss and Pribot? Did you use any one of those projects as a base to build upon?
C) We took ideas from all of them - different concepts, sensor fusion, map building, etc. The architectures we kind of independently conceived of. Motion planning, we took the concepts and then started here.
Q. So the code was written from scratch?
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