Autonomy: The Quest to Build the Driverless Car - And How It Will Reshape Our World. Lawrence Burns
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as drone technology and the Internet (a military invention whose distributed knowledge network was intended to safeguard the records of the U.S. government in the event of a nuclear attack). DARPA was also responsible for such less-than-useful innovations as mechanical lobsters for the U.S. Navy and DNA-editing techniques intended to create humans who didn’t need sleep. Now DARPA Director Tony Tether was turning the agency’s direction toward autonomous cars.
For years, Washington had pushed American defense contractors to develop autonomous technology so that a third of all American military vehicles could be self-driving by 2015—a stated mandate from Congress. In the aftermath of 9/11, the effort took on added urgency as the U.S. military lost infantrymen and -women to improvised explosive devices planted under the roads in Afghanistan and Iraq. If self-driving vehicles ever became possible, military robots might drive themselves over the sort of desert roads found in overseas theaters of war. But the four-star generals had been frustrated with the pace of change. The problem was proving too difficult for the military contractors. And so Tether struck upon a novel solution: DARPA would stage a race. For robot cars.
As Whittaker recounted the details to Urmson, they sounded a little insane. DARPA said it would allow any American team to enter—student, hobbyist, professional, whomever. The course would bisect the Mojave Desert, running eastward from Barstow, California, to Primm, Nevada, for a distance of about 150 miles. The prize money would go to the first team that could do it in under ten hours.
“Wow,” Urmson said, thinking Whittaker was just making conversation.
But Whittaker never just made conversation. The prize money, the old marine said, was a million bucks. And Whittaker wanted to win that money with Urmson’s help.
It would be three years before I met Chris Urmson, who would go on to become one of my favorite people. But I can see how this situation would have presented him with a dilemma that contradicted two of his prime directives. Urmson had a seemingly innate desire to try to improve the stupid and inefficient things about the world; he once interrupted an important business meeting at a Pittsburgh coffee shop to burst out onto the street and direct traffic, just to help someone turn left out of a parking lot. He was programmed with an engineer’s duty to seek out the coolest and most interesting projects that could change the lives of the most people. Which is why Hyperion was such a perfect project for him. How could you get cooler than an autonomous robot designed to seek out life on other planets?
Actually, it turned out that you could. Urmson’s work with Hyperion was helping the robot travel anywhere from 15 to 25 centimeters a second—about the pace of a slow walk. In the DARPA race, the robot would have to travel 150 miles in at least 10 hours, which required an average speed of about 15 mph, as fast as most cyclists went. The speed, the money, the fact that the race was intended to address an issue killing American soldiers overseas—Urmson got it. He ached to participate.
But there was a problem: He was also programmed with a duty passed down to him from his parents, to do what was best for his family.
Chris Urmson was born in 1976 to Paul and Susan Urmson, an English couple who had immigrated to Canada because they thought it would represent better opportunities for their three sons. Paul’s first career was as an electrician, and then, once his kids were born, he pursued his college degree at night school, earning his BA and then master’s. Susan enrolled in nursing school after the kids were born and went on to administer methadone programs within the Canadian prison system.
The point? The three Urmson boys grew up in homes where the parents were always working, always bettering themselves for the sake of the family and where education was prized from the kids’ earliest ages. The Urmson parents ran their lives for their children. The family moved a lot because Paul’s work in the prison system required him to transfer around the country. Each time they did, Paul and Susan settled the family in the cheapest house in the nicest neighborhood they could find—a strategy they devised to send their kids to the best public schools. The strategy worked. In addition to birthing one of the most important engineers in the development of autonomous cars, the Urmsons also raised an orthopedic surgeon and a Mountie, a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, which is something of a trifecta for middle-class families north of the border.
At a young age, Chris’s teachers assessed him as gifted, which qualified him to attend special classes with similarly intelligent children. The classes provided the ability to conduct independent projects. Gifted-program teachers encouraged their students to enter a series of science fairs then known as Olympics of the Mind, which challenged participants to solve unconventional problems. How do you build a tower out of just paper towel tubes? Propel a toy car with a mousetrap? Safeguard an egg dropped from an extreme height?
The experiences set Urmson up well to compete in Canada-wide science fairs. The year the Urmson family moved from Victoria to Trenton, the national finals happened to be held in Victoria. Urmson ached to visit his old friends, and so he directed all his energies toward winning the local competition. His entry, “Striking News About Impacts,” predicted the direction a body would travel after a collision. He won the Trenton fair, and received the free trip to Victoria.
Bit by the science bug, Urmson followed up with a project involving a model of ionic propulsion—“Ionic, Isn’t It?” was the project name. It not only won him another trip to the Canada-wide competition, but also garnered him second prize. Another year he won a silver medal at the national level and qualified for a four-week trip to study programming at Israel’s Weizmann Institute. Urmson would go on to study computer engineering at the University of Manitoba, where one of his projects entailed building a robot that traveled autonomously around a darkened room, seeking out the brightest sources of light.
Urmson was torn in his last year of university. One path, favored by mothers everywhere, might have seen Urmson going on to med school. Except that didn’t exercise his yen for building things, for envisioning complex systems and then figuring out how to make them work. Wandering by the office of his computer engineering department one day, Urmson’s eye was caught by a remarkable poster: a vehicle, maybe some sort of a planetary rover, climbing up and out of some sort of crater. “Come be a part of the robot revolution!” the poster read, with information about attending Carnegie Mellon University. It was a career based on the sort of thing Urmson had been doing all his life. Olympics of the Mind. Science-fair stuff. He applied, and ended up in Pittsburgh the following year.
At Carnegie Mellon, Urmson met Red Whittaker, who by 2003 already was a legend in American robotics and one of the best-known robot designers in the world. Born in 1948, Whittaker was fifty-five in 2003 and had become widely known for his willingness to take on projects that everyone else thought impossible. “If there is anyone in the world who can find a way to make things happen, it’s Red Whittaker,” said one colleague.
Whittaker may have been genetically programmed to ignore the impossible. His father was an air force bombardier in World War II who would go on to sell explosives to mining companies. His science-teacher mother was an amateur pilot who once flew under a bridge while the young Whittaker was in the plane alongside her. After serving in the marines for two years, Whittaker attended Princeton University, earning his degree in civil engineering in 1973, and then attending graduate school at Carnegie Mellon.
Whittaker made his name after the partial meltdown in 1979 of the Three Mile Island nuclear-generating station, America’s worst-ever nuclear accident. Cleaning up the incident required getting into the reactor’s basement to learn how radioactive the site was. Several contractors spent almost a billion dollars on the cleanup but still couldn’t figure out how to get inside. When Whittaker asked for his shot, the government figured they didn’t have anything to lose. Whittaker reasoned that, while the radioactivity prevented humans from getting into the reactor, machines should have no problem. He created a three-wheeled Remote Reconnaissance Vehicle, known as “Rover,” which he operated by remote control. Rover successfully made it to the basement. Best of all? The program cost only $1.5 million, which the government considered