Anthony Levandowski

Anthony Levandowski (born March 15, 1980) is a French-American self-driving car engineer.

Levandowski was born on March 15, 1980, in Brussels, Belgium to a French diplomat mother and an American businessman.

He moved to California in the mid-1990s.

During his teenage years, he developed websites for local businesses.

In 1998, Levandowski entered the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned bachelor's and master's degrees in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research.

As a freshman, he founded La Raison, an intranet and IT services company that made fifty thousand dollars in its first year.

His sophomore year, Levandowski built the BillSortBot, a robot made from 300 Lego pieces that sorted Monopoly money for the Sun Microsoft robotics competition.

He won first place.

In 2003, Levandowski launched Construction Control Systems with Randy Miller to build WorkTop, a portable blueprint reader and updater for construction sites.

In 2003, Levandowski and fellow Berkeley engineers, aka the "Blue Team", started building an autonomous motorcycle, nicknamed Ghost Rider, for the 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge.

The Ghost Rider motorcycle was originally a Honda RX.

It was built over several years for an estimated $100,000 and competed in the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2004 and 2005.

It was the only autonomous two-wheeled vehicle in the competitions.

The motorcycle was retrofitted with video cameras, computers, a GPS receiver, an IMU, and motors to power the clutch and steering.

As the team lead, participation in the DARPA Grand Challenge paved the way for Levandowski to build PriBot, the first self-driving car to drive on public roads.

In 2006, Levandowski began working with Sebastian Thrun, whom he had met at the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, on VueTool.

Vuetool was a Stanford street mapping project that used cameras mounted on vehicles to create maps.

In 2007, Levandowski donated the Ghost Rider to the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, where it now resides.

In early 2007, Google X hired Thrun, Levandowski, and their entire team to help develop the Google Street View system.

To meet Larry Page's target of capturing 1000000 km of roadways before the end of 2007, Levandowski ordered 100 Toyota Priuses from a local dealership.

The Street View team's success was partially due to the "Topcon box" or IP-S2 Mobile Mapping System, a roof mounted box composed of Lidar, cameras, GPS, IMUs, and wheel encoders that enabled a car to drive around and create a 3D map.

The Topcon box was designed by 510 Systems, a start-up co-founded by Levandowski in early 2007 alongside Pierre-Yves Droz and Andrew Schultz.

In 2008, Levandowski was approached by the director of Discovery Channel's Prototype This! requesting to use the Ghost Rider in an episode to deliver a pizza using an unmanned vehicle.

The Ghost Rider was in the Smithsonian at the time, so Levandowski offered to retrofit a Toyota Prius for the show.

Levandowski approached Google and 510 Systems with the venture, but they both turned him down for liability reasons.

Levandowski stated, in an interview with The Guardian, "Google was very supportive of the idea, but it absolutely did not want its name associated with it. Google was worried about a Google engineer building a car that crashes and kills someone."

In June 2008, with Google's blessing, Levandowski founded Anthony's Robots in order to build the PriBot.

The PriBot was "a self-driving Toyota Prius with one of the first spinning Lidar laser ranging units and the first-ever to drive on public roads."

For the show footage, the police cleared the road and escorted the driverless Prius on a pre-determined route from San Francisco across the Bay Bridge.

The drive was successful, aside from scraping against a guard rail on a sharp turn.

Within the span of weeks, Levandowski had demonstrated that self-driving cars were possible, even on a budget.

In 2009, Levandowski co-founded Google's self-driving car program, now known as Waymo, and was a technical lead until 2016.

Google employed 510 Systems technology until it quietly acquired the company in 2011.

In 2016, he co-founded and sold Otto, an autonomous trucking company, to Uber Technologies.

In 2018, he co-founded the autonomous trucking company Pronto; the first self-driving technology company to complete a cross-country drive in an autonomous vehicle in October 2018.

At the 2019 AV Summit hosted by The Information, Levandowski remarked that a fundamental breakthrough in artificial intelligence is needed to move autonomous vehicle technology forward.

In 2019, Levandowski was indicted on 33 federal charges of alleged theft of self-driving car trade secrets.

In August 2020, Levandowski pled guilty to one of the 33 charges, and was sentenced to 18 months in prison.

He was pardoned less than six months later on January 20, 2021, the last day of Donald Trump's presidency.

In September, 2021 Levandowski rejoined Pronto as CEO; subsequently announcing the company's new offroad autonomous division.