Anthony Levandowski, the former engineer at Google, does not need any introduction, thanks to all the controversies, he faced in the past one year. The irony is that the man who was the originator of the idea of driverless vehicles, is at the centre of a lawsuit between two major companies, for stealing the same. However, the lawsuit is against him, he must be credited for the introduction to such a technology.
Early Life
Anthony Levandowski was born on 15 March 1980. At the age of 18, he joined the University of California, Berkeley. He received a bachelor’s and a master’s degree, in Industrial Engineering and Operation Research. He was always into machines and loved working on them. In 2004, he participated in the DARPA Grand Challenge with his autonomous motorcycle, named as the Ghostrider, that he built with the help of other fellow engineers. The motorcycle was first of its kind as it was a driver-less bike that rode in the challenge.
Career
Anthony took a job at Google and started working on the Google’s Street View project, in 2007. Already being in love with machines and automobiles, he kept on experimenting with the driver-less cars and started his own company 510 Systems in the same year, he joined Google. He started another company with the name Anthony’s Robots that produced self-driving cars. Under Anthony’s Robots, he built a self-driving Toyota Prius, Pribot, having one of the first spinning Lidar laser ranging units that rode on the public roads.
After recognising the potential of Anthony’s autonomous car production projects, Google acquired the both, transforming it into a single venture, Waymo. Anthony continued making self-driving cars under Waymo, for Google, until January 2016.
Founding Otto
In 2016, Anthony left the job at Google and co-founded Otto, self-driving technology company, along with his former colleague from Google, Lior Ron. In the same year, Uber acquired Otto by paying $680 million. Levandowski held the leadership of Uber’s driverless car operation and continued working with Otto. In October 2016, Otto manufactured an autonomous semi-truck, that completed the 132-mile route, achieving the longest continuous journey by a driverless vehicle.
The Controversy
In February 2017, his former company, Waymo, filed a lawsuit against him, accusing him of stealing 9.7 GB of Waymon’s highly confidential files, trading the secrets and using the blueprints and design files to manufacture autonomous vehicles for Uber. Waymo claimed that the files were stolen, back in 2009, while Levandowski was still working with Google. Levandowski was refrained from working with Otto and later, in the same year, Uber fired him for not co-operating in the investigation.
Levandowski started his own self-driving car company named Kache.ai in July 2018.
Yashica is a Software Engineer turned Content Writer, who loves to write on social causes and expertise in writing technical stuff. She loves to watch movies and explore new places. She believes that you need to live once before you die. So experimenting with her life and career choices, she is trying to live her life to the fullest.