Machines of Loving Grace (6 page)

Once again, however, bad luck struck.
His primary vehicle led Stanley until late in the race, when it malfunctioned, slowing dramatically and allowing the Stanford team to sail by and grab the $2 million prize.
After the second loss, Whittaker stood in the tent in front of his team and gave an inspiring speech worthy of any college football coach.
“On any Sunday .
.
.”
he told his team, echoing the words of the losing coach.
The loss was especially painful because the leaders of the Stanford team, Sebastian Thrun and Mike Montemerlo, were former CMU roboticists who had defected to Stanford, where they organized the rival, winning effort.
Years later the loss still rankled.
Outside of Whittaker’s office at the university is a portrait of the ill-fated team of robot car designers.
In the
hallway Whittaker would greet visitors and replay the failure in detail.

The defeat was particularly striking because Red Whittaker had in many ways been viewed widely as the nation’s premier roboticist.
By the time of the Grand Challenges he had already become a legend for designing robots capable of going places where humans couldn’t go.
For decades he combined a can-do attitude with an adventurer’s spirit.
His parents had both flown planes with a bit of barnstorming style.
His father, an air force bomber pilot, sold mining explosives after the war.
His mother, a chemist, was a pilot, too.
When he was a young man, she had once flown him under a bridge.
³

His Pennsylvania upbringing led him to develop a style of robotics that pushed in the direction of using the machines primarily as tools to extend an adventurer’s reach, a style in the tradition of Yvon Chouinard, the legendary climber who designed and made his own climbing hardware, or Jacques Cousteau, the undersea explorer who made his own breathing equipment.
With a degree in civil engineering from Princeton and a two-year tour as a marine sergeant, the six-foot-four Whittaker pioneered “field” robotics—building machines that left the laboratory and moved around in the world.

In Red Whittaker’s robotic world, however, humans were still very much in the loop.
In every case he used them to extend his reach as an adventurer.
He had built machines used in nuclear power plant catastrophes at both Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.
In the late 1980s he designed a huge nineteen-foot-tall robot called Ambler that was intended to walk on Mars.
He sent a robot into a volcano and had been one of the first roboticists in the United States to explore the idea of an autonomous car as part of Carnegie Mellon’s Navlab project.

“This is not the factory of the future,” he was fond of pointing out.
“The ideas that make it in the factory don’t make it in the outside world.”
⁴

As a young man Whittaker had variously been a rower, wrestler, boxer, and mountain climber.
His love of adventure had not been without personal pain, however.
He spent a decade of his life rock climbing, sneaking away from his robot projects to spend time in Yosemite and the Himalayas.
He even soloed the east wall of the Matterhorn in winter conditions.
He had begun climbing casually as a member of a local explorer’s club in Pittsburgh.
It only became a passion when he met another young climber, after seeing a notice on a bulletin board: “Expert climber willing to teach the right guy,” the note read, adding: “You must have a car.”

The two would become inseparable climbing partners over the next decade.

That magic time for Whittaker came to a sudden end one summer when they were climbing in Peru.
His Pittsburgh friend was climbing with another young climber.
The two were roped together and the younger man slipped and pulled both men down a tumbling set of ledges for almost a thousand feet.
Whittaker, who was off-rope during the accident, was able to rescue the young climber, but his friend was killed by the fall.
Whittaker returned to Pittsburgh shaken by the accident.
It would take months before he mustered up the courage to go over to the home where the young man had lived with his parents and clean out the dead climber’s room.

The death left its mark.
Whittaker stopped climbing, but still hungered for some sort of challenging adventure.
He began to build ever more exotic robots, capable of performing tasks ranging from simple exploration to sophisticated repair, to extend his adventures into volcanoes, and ultimately, perhaps, to the moon and Mars.
Even when he had been climbing on Earth in the 1970s and 1980s, it was becoming more and more difficult to find virgin territory.
With the possibility of “virtual exploration,” new vistas would open up indefinitely and Whittaker could again dream of climbing and rappelling, this time perhaps with a humanoid robot stand-in on another world.

Whittaker redeemed his bitter loss to Stanford’s Stanley several years later in the third Grand Challenge, in 2007.
His General Motors–backed “Boss” would win the final Urban Driving Challenge.

O
ne of the most enduring bits of Silicon Valley lore recalls how Steve Jobs recruited Pepsi CEO John Sculley to Apple by asking him if he wanted to spend the rest of his life selling sugar water.
Though some might consider it naive, the Valley’s ethos is about changing the world.
That is at the heart of the concept of “scale,” which is very much a common denominator in motivating the region’s programmers, hardware hackers, and venture capitalists.
It is not enough to make a profit, or to create something that is beautiful.
It has to have an impact.
It has to be something that goes under 95 percent of the world’s Christmas trees, or offers clean water or electricity to billions of people.

Google’s chief executive Larry Page took the Steve Jobs approach in recruiting Sebastian Thrun.
Thrun was a fast-rising academic who had spent a sabbatical year at Stanford in 2001, which opened his eyes to the world that Silicon Valley offered beyond the walls of academia.
There was more out there besides achieving tenure, publishing, and teaching students.

He returned to Stanford as an assistant professor in 2003.
He attended the first DARPA Grand Challenge as an observer.
The self-driving car competition completely changed his perspective: he realized that there were great thinkers outside of his cloistered academic community who cared deeply about changing the world.
In between, during his short return to CMU, he had sent a note to Whittaker offering to help their software effort, but was rebuffed.
Thrun had brought a group of students with him from CMU when he returned to Stanford, including Mike Montemerlo, whose father was a NASA roboticist.
Montemerlo gave a presentation on the first DARPA contest.
At the end of his presentation his final slide asked, “Should we at Stanford enter the Grand Challenge?”
And then he answered his own question in a large font.
“NO!”
There were a dozen reasons not to do it.
They would have no chance of winning, it was too hard, it would cost too much money.
Thrun looked at Montemerlo and it was obvious that although on paper he was the quintessential pessimist, everything in his demeanor was saying yes.

Sebastian Thrun (
left
) and Mike Montemerlo (
right
) in front of the Stanford University autonomous vehicle while it was being tested to take part in DARPA’s Urban Challenge in 2007.
(
Photo courtesy of the author
)

Soon afterward Thrun threw himself into the DARPA competition with passion.
For the first time in his life he felt like he was focusing on something that was genuinely likely to have broad impact.
Living in the Arizona desert for weeks on end, surviving on pizza, the team worked on the car until it was able to drive the backcountry roads flawlessly.

Montemerlo and Thrun made a perfect team of opposites.
Montemerlo was fundamentally conservative, and Thrun was extraordinarily risk-inclined.
As head of software, Montemerlo would build his conservative assumptions into his programs.
When he wasn’t looking, Thrun would go through the code and
comment out the limitations to make the car go faster.
It would infuriate the younger researcher.
But in the end it was a winning combination.

Larry Page had said to Thrun that if you really focus on something you can achieve amazing things.
He was right.
After Stanley captured the $2 million DARPA prize, Thrun took Page’s words to heart.
The two men had become friends after Thrun helped the Google cofounder debug a home robot that Page had been tinkering with.
Thrun borrowed the device and brought it back able to navigate inside Page’s home.

Navigation, a necessity for autonomous robots, had become Thrun’s particular expertise.
At CMU and later at Stanford he worked to develop SLAM, the mapping technique pioneered at Stanford Research Institute by the designers of the first mobile robots beginning in the 1960s.
Thrun had helped make the technique fast and accurate and had paved the way for using it in autonomous cars.
At Carnegie Mellon he had begun to attract national attention for a variety of mobile robots.
In 1998 at the Smithsonian in D.C., he showcased Minerva, a mobile museum tour guide that was connected to the Web and could interact with museum guests and travel up to three and a half miles per hour.
He worked with Red Whittaker to send robots into mines, which relied heavily on SLAM techniques.
Thrun also tried to integrate mobile and autonomous robots in nursing and elder-care settings, with little success.
It turned out to be a humbling experience, which gave him a deep appreciation of the limitations of using technologies to solve human problems.
In 2002, in a team effort between the two universities, Thrun pioneered a new flavor of SLAM that was dubbed FastSLAM, which could be used in real-world situations where it was necessary to locate thousands of objects.
It was an early example of a new wave of artificial intelligence and robotics that increasingly relied on probabilistic statistical techniques rather than on rule-based inference.

At Stanford, Thrun would rise quickly to become director of
the revitalized Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory that had originally been created by John McCarthy in the 1960s.
But he also quickly became frustrated by the fragmented life of an academic, dividing time between teaching, public speaking, grant writing, working on committees, doing research, and mentoring.
In the wake of his 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge victory Thrun had also become more visible in high-technology circles.
His talks described the mass atrocities committed by human drivers that resulted in more than one million killed and maimed each year globally.
He personalized the story.
A close friend had been killed in an automobile accident when Thrun was a high school student in his native Germany.
Many people he was close to lost friends in accidents.
More recently, a family member of a Stanford faculty secretary was crippled for life after a truck hit her car.
In an instant she went from being a young girl full of life and possibility to someone whose life was forever impaired.
Thrun’s change-the-world goals gave him a platform at places like the TED Conference.

After building two vehicles for the DARPA Challenge contests, he decided to leave Stanford.
Page offered him the opportunity to do things at “Google scale,” which meant that his work would touch the entire world.
He secretly set up a laboratory modeled vaguely on Xerox PARC, the legendary computer science laboratory that was the birthplace of the modern personal computer, early computer networks, and the laser printer, creating projects in autonomous cars and reinventing mobile computing.
Among other projects, he helped launch Google Glass, which was an effort to build computing capabilities including vision and speech into ordinary glasses.