The Unknown Start-up That Built Google’s First Self-Driving Car
The Unknown Start-up That Built Google’s First Self-Driving Car
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Two of Google’s signature innovations, Street View cameras and self-driving cars, were actually developed by 510 Systems, a small start-up that the tech giant quietly bought in 2011
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The purchase of 510 Systems and its sister company, Anthony’s Robots, in the fall of 2011 was never publicly announced. In fact, Google went so far as to insist that some 510 employees sign agreements not to discuss that the acquisition had even occurred. Google’s official history of its self-driving car project does not mention the firm at all. It emphasizes the leadership of Sebastian Thrun, the German computer scientist whose Stanford team won the autonomous-driving Grand Challenge in 2005, sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
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Though Google has portrayed Thrun as its “godfather” of self-driving, a review of the available evidence suggests that the motivating force behind the company’s program was actually Levandowski.
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In October 2011, 510 Systems quietly joined Google as a key part of the company’s semisecretive Google X “moon shot” division. The Pribot, long since bolstered by Google’s powerful software, written by Thrun’s team, came along with the acquisition.
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Google’s secrecy over the 510 Systems acquisition might be best understood through the lens of publicity. In 2010, a journalist at The New York Times, John Markoff, discovered the existence of Google’s self-driving car program. He was given a ride in one of 510’s Priuses and told that the project was the brainchild of Sebastian Thrun, director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and winner of the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge.

Maybe Google thought a famous prize-winning professor would be a more credible leader than the entrepreneurial runner-up Levandowski. Or perhaps the company simply wanted to avoid awkward questions about how the robot cars it had been secretly testing on public roads had actually been built in a Berkeley start-up. Either way, 510 Systems was neatly written out of the creation myth of Google’s self-driving cars long before it was acquired.

Most of 510 Systems, including all three founders—Levandowski, Schultz, and Droz—are still working on self-driving cars at Google. Levandowski remains the overall product lead, Schultz oversees embedded systems and electronics, and Droz manages 10 engineers. Majusiak eventually left Google in January to work at Blue River Technology, a start-up bringing robotics to agriculture.
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http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/artificial-intelligence/the-unknown-startup-that-built-googles-first-selfdriving-car
http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/artificial-intelligence/the-unknown-startup-that-built-googles-first-selfdriving-car

Labels: Oleg Zabluda

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