Sebastian Thrun is a roboticist whose work bridged the gap between academic autonomy research and real-world self-driving cars. He founded and directed the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL) and led the Stanford Racing Team whose vehicle, Stanley, won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge by completing a 132-mile desert course autonomously and taking the 2 million dollar prize - which his page calls “a pivotal moment in autonomous vehicle history.”
On the strength of that work, Thrun went on to direct the development of Google’s self-driving car project, which his page notes “eventually became Waymo and has driven millions of miles autonomously on public roads.” It was Thrun who wrote Google’s October 2010 blog post publicly revealing the project. He recruited heavily from the DARPA Grand Challenge community, turning a research contest into a commercial program.
In 2012 he co-founded Udacity, an online-education platform that his page reports has reached more than 35 million students across 190-plus countries with “nanodegree” programs in subjects including AI, self-driving cars, and data science. He summarizes his outlook with the line, “Only 1% of things that matter have been invented. 99% are not yet invented.”
Thrun is a useful figure for understanding the robotics-and-autonomy thread because his career traces the whole arc: a DARPA prize, a corporate moonshot, a spin-out into a real company, and an attempt to teach the next generation the skills involved.