Sebastian Thrun

Thrun was born in Solingen, West Germany, to Winfried and Kristin (Grüner) Thrun. He studied computer science, economics, and medicine at the University of Hildesheim, where he earned his Vordiplom (intermediate diploma) in 1988.

He later transferred to the University of Bonn, receiving a Diplom in 1993 and completing a PhD summa cum laude in computer science and statistics in 1995. His doctoral dissertation, Explanation-Based Neural Network Learning: A Lifelong Learning Approach, was supervised by Armin B. Cremers and Tom Mitchell.

In 1995, Thrun joined Carnegie Mellon University as a research computer scientist in the Computer Science Department.

In 1998, he became assistant professor and director of the Robot Learning Laboratory, later serving as the Finmeccanica Associate Professor of Computer Science and Robotics.

During this period, he developed Minerva, an autonomous robotic museum tour guide deployed at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in 1998. The robot interacted with thousands of visitors over a two-week deployment and contributed to advances in simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). He also led the Nursebot project, which focused on assistive robots in elder care environments.

Thrun co-founded the Center for Automated Learning and Discovery (CALD), later renamed the Machine Learning Department, recognized as the first academic department dedicated to machine learning. He co-chaired its early graduate program, the Master’s in Automated Learning and Discovery, which formed the basis for later machine learning doctoral programs at Carnegie Mellon University.

In 2003, Thrun joined Stanford University as an associate professor. In 2004, he re-established the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL), originally founded in 1963 by John McCarthy, and served as its director. He was promoted to full professor of computer science and electrical engineering in 2007.

At Stanford, he led the development of Stanley, the autonomous vehicle that won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge by completing a 212-kilometer desert course in approximately 6 hours and 54 minutes, earning a $2 million prize. The vehicle is now housed at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History.His team also developed Junior, which placed second in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge.

In 2004, Thrun founded the Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) conference, which has since become a major venue in robotics research. He now serves as an adjunct professor at Stanford.

In 2011, Thrun joined Google as a Google Fellow and Vice President. He co-founded Google X (the “moonshot factory”) with Yoky Matsuoka and Astro Teller, an advanced research lab focused on experimental and high-risk technology projects.

In X, he initiated Project Chauffeur, Google’s autonomous vehicle program, which later became Waymo in 2016. …

Thrun is widely recognized for his contributions to autonomous driving systems. His work includes leadership of the Stanford Racing Team’s Stanley vehicle, which won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge; development of Junior, which placed second in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge; and foundational work at Google that led to Project Chauffeur, later developed into Waymo.

His research contributed to perception systems, navigation, probabilistic decision-making, and large-scale robotic autonomy.

Together with Wolfram Burgard and Dieter Fox, Thrun helped establish probabilistic robotics, a field that applies statistical methods to robotics problems such as localization, mapping, and navigation.

Their book Probabilistic Robotics (2005, MIT Press) is widely used in the field and has been translated into multiple languages.

Key contributions include Monte Carlo localization, simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), and probabilistic mapping and navigation algorithms.

Thrun’s early work includes the development of autonomous and interactive robotic systems such as Rhino (University of Bonn, 1994), one of the earliest autonomous museum tour guide robots; Minerva (1998), deployed at the Smithsonian museum; the Nursebot project, focused on assistive robotics in healthcare environments; and collaborative work on mine-mapping robotics with William L. Whittaker.

Thrun contributed to or co-founded several projects at Google and Google X: