Photo: Wikipedia user Grendelkhan
Sebastian Thrun, the winner of the 2005 Darpa Grand Challenge, revealed how he was recruited by Google’s founders to start innovative projects including the self-driving car division.
In a series called “The Brave Ones,” made by CNBC, Thrun recalled the moment when he met Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the two founders of search engine giant Google.
While the latter needs no introduction to anyone with an Internet connection, Mr. Thrun may not be that renowned, in spite of his achievements.
Back in 2005, he was building a driverless car with his colleagues at Stanford, and the vehicle was part of the DARPA challenge. The event had its share of spectators, but two of them were the founders of the Internet search giant, and they had a mission.
Since Page and Brin were rather well known at the time, especially among tech enthusiasts, they turned to disguises. According to Thrun, Larry Page came to meet him while wearing a cap and dark sunglasses, in the hope that nobody would figure out who he was, and it worked.
The story does not mention what the disguise of Sergey Brin implied, but it is evident that he might have adopted a comparable artifice to avoid public attention while catering for he and his business partner's shared curiosity in this technology.
Needless to say, Thrun’s team won the challenge, and they moved to Google, where they developed the initial prototype. Just two years later, he built a car with cameras on it that were capable of recording 360-degrees of video, which became Google Street View.
In 2010, the Mountain View giant started a division named Google X, which was focused on “moonshot projects.” The idea was to have a secret department within the company that could experiment with groundbreaking concepts and ideas without the fear of failure. The first driverless car prototype for Google was born in just 15 months from the hands of a team with 12 engineers.
We keep reporting about Waymo, the spin-off that was started by Alphabet, another Google company. The autonomous car division has accomplished over 2.5 million miles of driving, and it plans to have a version meant for the average Joe on public roads in the next few years.
While the latter needs no introduction to anyone with an Internet connection, Mr. Thrun may not be that renowned, in spite of his achievements.
Back in 2005, he was building a driverless car with his colleagues at Stanford, and the vehicle was part of the DARPA challenge. The event had its share of spectators, but two of them were the founders of the Internet search giant, and they had a mission.
Since Page and Brin were rather well known at the time, especially among tech enthusiasts, they turned to disguises. According to Thrun, Larry Page came to meet him while wearing a cap and dark sunglasses, in the hope that nobody would figure out who he was, and it worked.
The story does not mention what the disguise of Sergey Brin implied, but it is evident that he might have adopted a comparable artifice to avoid public attention while catering for he and his business partner's shared curiosity in this technology.
Needless to say, Thrun’s team won the challenge, and they moved to Google, where they developed the initial prototype. Just two years later, he built a car with cameras on it that were capable of recording 360-degrees of video, which became Google Street View.
In 2010, the Mountain View giant started a division named Google X, which was focused on “moonshot projects.” The idea was to have a secret department within the company that could experiment with groundbreaking concepts and ideas without the fear of failure. The first driverless car prototype for Google was born in just 15 months from the hands of a team with 12 engineers.
We keep reporting about Waymo, the spin-off that was started by Alphabet, another Google company. The autonomous car division has accomplished over 2.5 million miles of driving, and it plans to have a version meant for the average Joe on public roads in the next few years.
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