Chris Urmson, back when he was a grad student, found himself in Chile’s Atacama Desert testing a robot that traveled about as fast as a person using a walker. The young Canadian thought that was pretty cool. Later, as a robotics doctoral candidate at Carnegie Mellon University, Urmson was a key part of a team that participated in the inaugural DARPA Grand Challenge, a competition in which teams built specially outfitted vehicles and attempted to “drive” them remotely across 150 miles of California’s Mojave Desert. That was even cooler…

That triumph caught the eye of Google, and the tech giant later hired Urmson to help it shape its emerging autonomous vehicle program then loosely known as X (it would later be spun off as Waymo). He eventually became the project’s chief technical officer, and he and his team—many of whom also had DARPA Challenge experience—would write the code for what would become known internally as “self-driving” vehicles during his eight-year tenure there.