Aurora Innovation was started by Sterling Anderson, the former director of Autopilot; Chris Urmson, the former CTO of Google’s self-driving car efforts, and Drew Bagnell, who headed autonomy and perception at Uber’s Advanced Technology Center in Pittsburgh.
The company has quietly opened an office in Pittsburgh, basing about half its staff here and half in Palo Alto, Calif. Aurora’s car, a 2017 Audi Q7, recently drove from Silicon Valley to the Steel City, collecting nearly 3,000 miles of data along the way that it’s using to refine its self-driving models.
Urmson and Bagnell pioneered work on autonomous vehicles at CMU. Urmson was director of technology on the university’s 2007 team that won the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Grand Challenge. Bagnell was a member of that team..