The Startup That Built Google’s First Self-Driving Car

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...

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.)

“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.

  So,who is Suzanna Musick?

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 ?