Robotic-Car Maker Sebastian Thrun on DARPA’s Next Grand Challenge: Traffic!

Last year, Sebastian Thrun, director of Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, headed up the team that won the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s first “Grand Challenge” by creating an autonomous vehicle that completed a 211-kilometer course in the Mojave Desert. Here he talks about the even greater difficulties presented by DARPA’s next Grand Challenge: creating a car that can navigate city traffic on its own. To say Thrun is enthusiastic about robotic cars is an understatement, but he also acknowledges that many of us will still want to drive on our own vehicle.

Thrun will discuss in more detail the future of robotic cars in an upcoming vlog, as well as in his keynote address at this year’s Emerging Technologies Conference at MIT.