methadone programs within the Canadian prison system.
The point? The three Urmson boys grew up in homes where the parents were always working, always bettering themselves for the sake of the family and where education was prized from the kids’ earliest ages. The Urmson parents ran their lives for their children. The family moved a lot because Paul’s work in the prison system required him to transfer around the country. Each time they did, Paul and Susan settled the family in the cheapest house in the nicest neighborhood they could find—a strategy they devised to send their kids to the best public schools. The strategy worked. In addition to birthing one of the most important engineers in the development of autonomous cars, the Urmsons also raised an orthopedic surgeon and a Mountie, a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, which is something of a trifecta for middle-class families north of the border.
At a young age, Chris’s teachers assessed him as gifted, which qualified him to attend special classes with similarly intelligent children. The classes provided the ability to conduct independent projects. Gifted-program teachers encouraged their students to enter a series of science fairs then known as Olympics of the Mind, which challenged participants to solve unconventional problems. How do you build a tower out of just paper towel tubes? Propel a toy car with a mousetrap? Safeguard an egg dropped from an extreme height?
The experiences set Urmson up well to compete in Canada-wide science fairs. The year the Urmson family moved from Victoria to Trenton, the national finals happened to be held in Victoria. Urmson ached to visit his old friends, and so he directed all his energies toward winning the local competition. His entry, “Striking News About Impacts,” predicted the direction a body would travel after a collision. He won the Trenton fair, and received the free trip to Victoria.
Bit by the science bug, Urmson followed up with a project involving a model of ionic propulsion—“Ionic, Isn’t It?” was the project name. It not only won him another trip to the Canada-wide competition, but also garnered him second prize. Another year he won a silver medal at the national level and qualified for a four-week trip to study programming at Israel’s Weizmann Institute. Urmson would go on to study computer engineering at the University of Manitoba, where one of his projects entailed building a robot that traveled autonomously around a darkened room, seeking out the brightest sources of light.
Urmson was torn in his last year of university. One path, favored by mothers everywhere, might have seen Urmson going on to med school. Except that didn’t exercise his yen for building things, for envisioning complex systems and then figuring out how to make them work. Wandering by the office of his computer engineering department one day, Urmson’s eye was caught by a remarkable poster: a vehicle, maybe some sort of a planetary rover, climbing up and out of some sort of crater. “Come be a part of the robot revolution!” the poster read, with information about attending Carnegie Mellon University. It was a career based on the sort of thing Urmson had been doing all his life. Olympics of the Mind. Science-fair stuff. He applied, and ended up in Pittsburgh the following year.
At Carnegie Mellon, Urmson met Red Whittaker, who by 2003 already was a legend in American robotics and one of the best-known robot designers in the world. Born in 1948, Whittaker was fifty-five in 2003 and had become widely known for his willingness to take on projects that everyone else thought impossible. “If there is anyone in the world who can find a way to make things happen, it’s Red Whittaker,” said one colleague.
Whittaker may have been genetically programmed to ignore the impossible. His father was an air force bombardier in World War II who would go on to sell explosives to mining companies. His science-teacher mother was an amateur pilot who once flew under a bridge while the young Whittaker was in the plane alongside her. After serving in the marines for two years, Whittaker attended Princeton University, earning his degree in civil engineering in 1973, and then attending graduate school at Carnegie Mellon.
Whittaker made his name after the partial meltdown in 1979 of the Three Mile Island nuclear-generating station, America’s worst-ever nuclear accident. Cleaning up the incident required getting into the reactor’s basement to learn how radioactive the site was. Several contractors spent almost a billion dollars on the cleanup but still couldn’t figure out how to get inside. When Whittaker asked for his shot, the government figured they didn’t have anything to lose. Whittaker reasoned that, while the radioactivity prevented humans from getting into the reactor, machines should have no problem. He created a three-wheeled Remote Reconnaissance Vehicle, known as “Rover,” which he operated by remote control. Rover successfully made it to the basement. Best of all? The program cost only $1.5 million, which the government considered cheap.
Since then, Whittaker had specialized in building robots designed to work in harsh environments. One of his creations explored volcanic craters. Another mantis-like contraption built structures in space. Still another, created with a team that included the German software wizard Sebastian Thrun, crawled through the darkness of long-abandoned mines, mapping their interior passageways. Urmson had worked with Whittaker to develop computer algorithms designed to increase the speed at which robots were able to travel autonomously.
When Urmson returned from the Atacama Desert, he had a tough conversation with his wife, Jennifer. Urmson wanted to set aside the completion of his PhD for a time and pursue the DARPA race with Whittaker. The DARPA Grand Challenge was the talk of their academic specialty. DARPA had figured it might be lucky to get twenty entries. Eventually, 106 teams would enter. Urmson felt he had no choice but to join. Who knew what sort of fascinating epiphanies would emerge from the project? Who knew what Urmson would miss if he didn’t take part?
Urmson convinced Jennifer to let him do one race. The couple would put off having kids until Urmson was done. But then fate threw them a slider: It turned out Jennifer was already pregnant. The news added to the pressure Urmson felt to win. After all, it was the best way to ensure he’d get a high-paying job, once he finished.
To attract a team, Red Whittaker put up posters all around the Carnegie Mellon campus advertising an unconventional, graduate-level seminar class, Mobile Robot Development. It was pass or fail, and it featured only one assignment: to build a robot that would win the first DARPA Grand Challenge. He also sent out email blasts to potential sponsors and volunteers, which featured his trademark bravado: “The race defies prevailing technology, and many hold that the challenge prize is unwinnable in our time.”
Whittaker staged the first meeting of the team in a Carnegie Mellon seminar room on April 30, 2003, according to Wayt Gibbs, a reporter the magazine Scientific American embedded in Pittsburgh. “Welcome to the first meeting of the Red Team,” Whittaker began. “I am committed to leading this team to victory in Las Vegas next year.”
The men and women in the room were about as motley a crew as it was possible to put together in Pittsburgh tech circles. Bob Bittner was a former combat engineer who’d spent six years in a submarine. Spencer Spiker was a retired helicopter test pilot, a West Point–educated mechanical engineer who led two hundred people as a company commander in the U.S. Army, and who had left the service to spend more time with his family—then found himself jobless in a severe recession. He joined Red’s team because he had nothing better to do, then worked himself into a full-time staff position. Michael Clark was a NASA engineer who used a wheelchair to get around; having fallen on hard times, he lived for a spell out of his van. Lots of people had seen Red’s poster, apparently, and lots of people were inspired to work on the project it advertised. “I don’t know anything about computers—but I’d like to volunteer,” said Mickey Struthers, a postman who showed up to the first class because he wanted to participate in a historic science project.
“You’ve got a warm body”—Whittaker grinned, shaking Mickey’s
