SAN
FRANCISCO — A roboticist and crucial member of the team that created
Google’s self-driving car is leaving the company, the latest in a string
of departures by important technologists working on the autonomous car
project.
Chris
Urmson, a Carnegie Mellon University research scientist, joined Google
in 2009 to help create the then-secret effort. He took over leadership
of the team after Sebastian Thrun, the Stanford computer scientist and
founder of Google X laboratory, left in 2013.
Johnny Luu, a spokesman for Alphabet,
the parent company of X, the company’s research division that oversees
the car project, confirmed Mr. Urmson was planning to leave.
“Seven
years ago, the idea that a car could drive itself wasn’t much more than
an idea. Chris has been a vital force for the project, helping the team
move from a research phase to a point where this lifesaving technology
will soon become a reality. He departs with our warmest wishes,” Mr. Luu
wrote in an email message.
The
departures come after Google’s decision last year to hire John Krafcik,
the former president and chief executive of Hyundai America, to be
chief of the car project, as part of a plan to spin the effort out as a
stand-alone company under the Alphabet umbrella.
The
X research group, often called Google’s “moonshot” division, is under
increasing pressure to show that at some point the company can expect a
financial windfall from its projects. Google’s self-driving car project
has been a pioneer in autonomous vehicle technology, but a commercial
version of the car is still likely to be several years away.
Mr.
Urmson has been unhappy with the direction of the car project under Mr.
Krafcik’s leadership and quarreled privately several months ago with
Larry Page over where it was headed, according to two former Google
employees. A spokesman for Google declined to comment on those
discussions, but Mr. Urmson disputed they were a reason for his
departure.
After
the dispute, Mr. Urmson decided to take the summer off and only
recently decided to leave the company. He told members of the
self-driving car team about his decision on Thursday, the former
employees said.
In a post published on Medium
Friday afternoon, Mr. Urmson said he had not decided what he will do
next. “If I can find another project that turns into an obsession and
becomes something more, I will consider myself twice lucky,” he wrote.
“I have every confidence that the mission is in capable hands.”
As
a researcher at Carnegie Mellon, Mr. Urmson was a member of a team of
engineers that placed second in the 2005 Darpa Grand Challenge contest
for autonomous vehicles that was won by a rival team from Stanford, led
by Mr. Thrun. In 2007, Carnegie Mellon got revenge when it placed first
in the Darpa Urban Challenge, while the Stanford team finished second.
Earlier
this year, a group of Google employees, led by Anthony Levandowski,
former Google Car engineer, and Lior Ron, the product lead for Google
Maps, left to found the self-driving truck start-up Otto, which is based
in San Francisco.
More
recently, two other Google car engineers, Dave Ferguson and Jiajun Zhu,
who are considered experts on so-called machine vision technology, left
to found an as-yet-unannounced start-up, according to the two people
with knowledge of the Google car project.
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