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…

Today, Urmson is the co-founder and CEO of Aurora Innovation—Aurora for short—a startup dedicated to developing an integrated driverless software, data-processing, and hardware solution…

“We’re making transportation better. We’re making it safer. We’re making it more accessible. We’re making it economically better. That’s what we’re about. That’s what automated vehicles are going to do,” Urmson said.