A BEAUTIFUL
MIND
that would eventually help him
design a “nursebot” to assist elderly patients. When he graduated
from the University of Bonn with
a Ph. D. in computer science and
statistics in 1995, he leaped at the
chance to join the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University—what then
seemed like “paradise” to Thrun—
and spent eight years there before
moving to Stanford, where he was
computer science guru.
Out in the Valley, Thrun struck
up an acquaintanceship with
Google co-founder Larry Page,
who asked him to see a robot Page
had built in his spare time. The
two men met for dinner at a casual Japanese restaurant in Palo
Alto and Thrun returned to Page’s
house to see his creation. The
robot’s hardware was in decent
shape, but Page “got stuck on the
software side of it,” according to
Thrun’s diagnosis. He borrowed
the robot, flew in a few friends,
and returned Page’s bot within a
day after giving it the ability to
localize itself. After another two
or three days of work, the robot
could navigate. Thrun said Page
was “blown away.”
In 2005, Thrun’s engineering
team at the Stanford Artificial
Intelligence Laboratory built a
HUFFINGTON
8.19.12
Thrun says
his stay-athome mom was
“heavy into
punishing
people and
sins and all
that stuff.”
driverless car, a blue Volkswagen
Touareg SUV named Stanley, that
managed to navigate 132 miles
o f desert terrain on its own, becoming the first self-driving car
in history to win the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
(DARPA) Grand Challenge — a
race through the sands of Nevada
organized by the United States
Department of Defense. The previous year, not a single one of the
15 entries from some of the most
powerful robotics engineers in
the world had managed to com-