Driver less cars

Sebastian Thrun on self-driving cars

Ted talk: Sebastian Thrun on creating self-driving cars

http://blog.ted.com/2011/03/31/googles-driverless-car-sebastian-thrun-on-ted-com/

Sebastian Thrun presents the progress that has been achieved by Stanford in association with Google in developing the first driverless car. He starts with his personal reason for his involvement and dedication to this project, which was his best friend dying in an automobile accident when he was 18. Due to this accident, Sebastian determined that he wanted to prevent any other child to go through the fate that his best friend had gone through. Sebastian was geared for development of robotics throughout his education. He gained his bachelor’s degree at University of Hildesheim, and his master’s and PhD at University of Bonn in computer science. Once he gained his PhD, he joined the robotics team at Carnegie Mellon. While there he co-founded the Master’s Program in Automated Learning and Discovery, which later became a PhD. program. After he had done this, he went to Stanford University for a one year sabbatical, returned to Carnegie Mellon, then permanently moved to Stanford where he became an associate professor and the director of SAIL (Stanford AI lab). Through this, he gained control of a very successful group, and made them famous with the development of the robotic vehicle, Stanley, which won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, which is a driverless car challenge funded by the Department of Defense. Through this success, Sebastian gained the lead in development of driverless car, and then started working with Google on the everyday driverless car project. Due to these advances, the idea of driverless cars has started to form and become a definite possibility for the future.

This applies to my interests and what I want to do after high school because I want to be able to change the world in a way similar to this. Take a new step in a direction only dreamed about, using engineering to fix the problems that we all have been affected by. The idea of a driverless car, a solution to the number one cause of deaths among adolescents is an amazing thing to me. With this amazing machine, not only could we save countless lives, but also eliminate traffic on highways and save the gasoline wasted in those traffic back-ups. I want to be able to do something like this in the future, develop something that will change the world for the better. Engineering, which is the major that I wish to be involved in, is the key to these innovations that will change our world. I don’t know if I specifically want to go into this exact form of engineering, with robotics, but I know that I want to be involved in the general area of engineering that this branches from. Through examples like this, I see that the things thought impossible years ago are becoming realities now. I hope to aspire to this level of affect that this invention will have on society, but this achievement shows me that the only way to gain access to this pedigree of influence is through hard work and dedication to the invention that is thought to be the solution to a problem. This has changed how I think about some school work; where you just coast and settle for an average grade, but more push yourself to another level. This summer I am working for a systems integration company, which I hope will help with my possible engineering career in the future. Thrun must have run into countless problems through his developments in this field, but he continued to preserver, and he succeeded, which is an example that the engineers of tomorrow should follow. It is an example that I will follow, and I hope that I will be able to do something half as important as this.

Alex Campbell