
The Startup That Built Google’s First Self-Driving Car - spectruman
http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/artificial-intelligence/the-unknown-startup-that-built-googles-first-selfdriving-car
======
uuilly
I worked at 510 for 2 years. We were a little over 10 people when I started
and around 60 people when we sold to Google. The whole thing was bootstrapped,
no VC's. Bryon Majusiak, the guy interviewed in the article, is a great guy, a
hard charger and a very practical engineer. So much so that I hired him away
from Google a little less than a year ago for another robotics endeavor.

510 did many great things and got credit for nearly none of it. We barely had
a website b/c big companies like Google, Microsoft and Nokia liked letting
people think it was all them. Quite frankly, we were happy to take the money,
but in hindsight, we should have aimed higher.

The article gives the impression that we only did hardware. That is not true.
We did all the sensor integration and real-time systems software. We also sold
our GPS filter to Google early on for Street View.

It was a scrappy place. We solved hard problems very quickly and big companies
often resented us for it and reluctantly bought our wares. In return we were
silent.

The employees were fantastic and the management was horrendous. We laughed a
lot, we fought a lot and we drank a lot. The founders, like most 20 somethings
who've achieved too much success too early, were amazing in many ways but
deeply flawed. They did not realize that the Berkeley Robotics Lab did not
prepare them to manage a real company. They could never see that they were the
ones in the way of their own success. Since there were no VC's there was no
board. I never again worked for a place where the CEO could not be fired. And
I never worked for a founder who had too many life lessons in front of him.

Anyways, lessons learned: The value is in final products not in parts of
products, people don't change on a startup's timeline and getting acquired is
generally a letdown.

Onwards and upwards...

~~~
pm90
If you could (or have already) written a blog post about your experience, I
would love to read it.

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Animats
Well, Lewandowsky heads Google's self driving car project now. Thrun is long
gone, off trying to make Udacity fly.

He's an impressive guy. I met him when he was going to Berkeley and doing the
self-balancing motorcycle for the 2005 Grand Challenge. He'd already done a
startup, with a specialized giant laptop for construction sites for people who
needed to see blueprints.

The LIDAR Google uses is from Velodyne, which was "Team DAD" in the 2005 Grand
Challenge. The first version of their LIDAR fell off their vehicle, but they
improved the mechanics and produced that cone-shaped thing Google now uses.
That's really a research tool; a different approach is needed for production
vehicles. (I still like the Advanced Scientific Concepts flash LIDAR; it's
expensive, but that's because it has custom silicon. If you had to get the
price down, that's where to start. No moving parts, all electronics.)

I'm kind of disappointed with Google's self-driving effort on the hardware
side. I'd expected flash LIDARs, terahertz phased array radars, and other
advanced sensors by now. You need to be able to see in all directions, but the
requirements to the sides and back are less than for looking ahead. The
CMU/Cadillac effort is ahead on the hardware side; their self-driving car has
all its sensors integrated into the vehicle so you don't notice them.

(I had an entry in the 2005 Grand Challenge: Team Overbot. Ours was too slow,
and we worried about off-road capability too much.)

~~~
joshvm
I suspect price is still the driver (pun intended) here. Flash LIDAR is, for
the most part, shockingly expensive. Some companies like Toyota are looking
into bringing the cost down with CMOS SPAD arrays, but it's still very much
lab work. Similarly the Velodyne system ain't cheap and was close to $80k not
too long ago. Stereo is pretty much free, but still needs more work to make it
robust enough. Even smaller line scan LIDAR units (e.g. the SICK LMS models)
are around $5k each.

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sam-mueller
I recently learned that Elon Musk wasn't actually the founder of Tesla, but
rather an early investor. This article borders on the same theme; there's more
than meets the eye to the faces of today's most innovative technologies. It is
alarming to see how often proper accreditation is being misattributed/stolen
in our industry.

~~~
simonebrunozzi
Regarding Elon Musk, do you have a reference you can point to? Just curious.

~~~
gumby
[http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/In-
Gear/2013/0919/5-things...](http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/In-
Gear/2013/0919/5-things-you-probably-didn-t-know-about-Tesla-Motors)

I was quite surprised by the parent comment because I had never heard of Musk
being described as a founder. But then again I've lived in palo alto since
before tesla was founded so the power struggle was minor gossip at the time
(and was in the mercury news).

What _has_ surprised me is that he is in fact listed as a founder on the
wikipedia web site and in fact Tesla litigated over the matter.

Now the word "founder" is weird -- IME A round paperwork typically refers to
any common shareholder at the time of venture investment as a "founder". And
then there was that bizarre Facebook suit over who could refer to themselves
as a company founder. Weird.

~~~
ChuckMcM
"Founder" title drama is mostly around successful companies in my experience.
Basically some additional mojo can be had a funding discussions if you can
legitimately claim to be a 'founder' of some previous success (the bigger the
better). Especially in social settings it is strange (and to my twisted humor
funny) when people will say they 'worked' at one company and 'founded' another
company when they had the exact same role in each company at the same level of
development and differ only in the perception of 'success' or 'not success'.

After reading the article on how primates use 'fame' in dominance games that
made the rounds here I found that it identified that sort of behavior pretty
precisely.

------
ohsnap
Seems like the journalist is trying a little to hard to create a controversy.
510 was never 'unknown' and they always had a close relationship with Google.
Consider the story in '08 - [http://www.cnet.com/news/robotic-prius-takes-
itself-for-a-sp...](http://www.cnet.com/news/robotic-prius-takes-itself-for-a-
spin-around-sf/)

~~~
jacobsimon
I think the bigger point is that Google has created a revisionist story about
the origin of its self-driving car that the vast majority of people, including
myself, would never have known about. For example, there was no mention of it
at this summer's self-driving car exhibit at the Computer History Museum in
Mountain View. Is it necessary that Google represent the true story in its
marketing material? No, of course not, but it is strange that they would go to
that extent to keep the acquisition a secret for so long.

~~~
ohsnap
Have not seen the museum. So long as they are crediting the engineers from the
DARPA contests then the story is not revisionist. Everything since DARPA has
been fairly incremental with contributions from a wide variety of people
(including 510). There just isn't a Da Vinci code type conspiracy going on
here.

------
ilyaeck
The article presents a one-sided story at best. I actually interviewed at
Google for "project that shall not be named" in June 2009, with Sebastian
Thrun and Chris Urmson (the current head of the project). I could tell the
project was already well underway. Although none of them would say anything
about, it was pretty clear what they were building. So, while '510' may have
played some part, the writer is grossly exaggerating their significance.

------
amjaeger
Maybe I'm missing something, but isn't the lidar on the google car made by
Velodyne? I know the radio head video used Velodyne's Lidar. And the picture
of the lidar that they show is a picture of the Velodyne HDL-64 Can anyone
explain?

~~~
bri3d
The article didn't really make it sound like 510 built the LIDAR, just that
they do the integration and software to process the data into maps. The
article is also very explicit about their role in processing the data into the
cool cloud visualization for the Radiohead video, not capturing it.

~~~
teraflop
I think the photo captioned "510’s lidar system" and showing nothing besides
than a Velodyne sensor bolted to a frame is specific enough to be misleading.

------
mturmon
The nut appears to be this:

“From then on, we started doing a lot of work with Google,” says Majusiak. “We
did almost all of their hardware integration. They were just doing software.
We’d get the cars and develop the controllers, and they’d take it from there.”

Anybody who has done robotics knows there is a lot of integration involved
(hardware and software), and that doing integration is hard and tends to be
thankless. It's nice to see some in-depth reporting in a major publication on
the full depth of the engineering team.

------
Schwolop
Replying to ekm2, who is hell-banned:

    
    
      So,who is Suzanna Musick?
    

Good question! I'm not going to post details here, but she appears to have
plenty of public info easily Google-able, including a Linkedin profile and the
name of her current startup. That said, I couldn't find anything about this
company at all, and don't want to delve too much deeper as it's starting to
make me feel creepy.

~~~
ekm2
Thank you!

I had no idea i was hellbanned(though I wont waste my time begging for an
unbanning).

~~~
dang
> I had no idea i was hellbanned

That's because you're not. You posted a couple of comments from an IP that was
banned because of past abuses (apparently by others). We unbanned the UP and
unkilled the two comments.

It's on our list to make the IP banning system better so that this happens
less often. Having it happen at all is bad, obviously, but the measures
available to counter abuse are often unsatisfactorily crude, and doing nothing
is not an option.

~~~
Schwolop
My apologies, I should've just said "banned" or "dead" or some other word.
I've seen other people use the "hellbanned" word before and figured it was the
right phrase.

Out of interest, I did look up the user and saw that he/she seemed not to have
done anything that I felt deserving of any form of ban - how should I have
communicated this back to you? Am I even encouraged to do so?

~~~
dang
Absolutely! Email us at hn@ycombinator.com. We're more than happy to fix stuff
like this.

We intend to build ways for the community to regulate these things without
going through us, but it's going to take a while to get there.

------
trhway
like with Internet, the self-driving cars revolution is firmly rooted in
DARPA's Grand/Urban Challenges of 2004/2005/2007 years. In fact i have hard
time finding any principal progress in Google cars from the winners/top cars
of 7 years ago. Though obviously there is a lot of evolutionary/product-
development-style improvement, especially related to increased processing
power available for sensor/image data processing.

~~~
leoedin
That tends to be the case with all technologies though. Initial progress at
adding features is much greater (to an outside observer) than later progress.
What you probably don't see is the large number of small incremental
improvements that are slowly ironing out edge cases, fixing bugs and turning
prototypes into something reproducable. I bet if you ask any team involved in
those challenges you'd find that the apparently functional cars were
constantly requiring fixing and tweaking in a way that the Google cars of
today probably don't.

------
threeseed
Someone really needs to explain to me what the thought process behind this
acquisition was.

Self driving car technologies have has actively developed by almost every car
company for years now. Many of the beginnings of this work has already made it
to market e.g. Parallel Park Assist, Auto Emergency Breaking, Lane Merge
Detection, Adaptive Cruise Control. And companies like Volvo are already
testing their self driving cars in real world, difficult conditions in Sweden.
And because there are only a few car conglomerates they will simply share
technology within each group.

So what is their end game ?

~~~
robotresearcher
My guesses:

1) To supply the data that the future robot cars will consume, and profit via
license fees. The Google cars use data-heavy techniques with very good
preexisting metric maps.

2) To speed up the development of technology that will save perhaps 20,000
lives a year in North America alone. Larry Page has enough power and Google
enough money that they can do stuff with "because it's great" as a primary
reason.

(I'm not affiliated with Google, but have pondered this question and asked
around)

~~~
threeseed
But wouldn't it be better for Google to focus on doing data supply deals with
the existing car companies ? Far less money, risk etc.

And Google isn't helping speed up the technology. Companies like Volvo are far
ahead already.

~~~
zeroxfe
> Companies like Volvo are far ahead already.

Volvo is actually far behind -- their cars are designed for Level 3 Autonomous
Driving, while Google cars are Level 4. Also, Google has far more miles in
real-world city driving than Volvo.

Right now Google is furthest ahead in this space, arguably by years.

~~~
threeseed
Where have you heard this ? Everything I've seen to date has Google/Volvo at
the same level. And it's somewhat irrelevant how many years Google is ahead
when they have zero experience in bringing automative to market.

------
wololo
Early Street View history:
[http://thetrendythings.com/read/7424](http://thetrendythings.com/read/7424)

------
ekm2
So,who is Suzanna Musick?

------
general_failure
Wow, this is seriously good journalism. Thanks for ythis!

