Navigating Academia and Industry in Autonomous Vehicle Research

This video is a recording of an interview done with Chuck Thorpe for the FreakTakes Substack. Chuck was a long-time researcher and PI at Carnegie Mellon. He primarily engaged in computer vision research that would go into the earliest driverless vehicles. By the late 1980s, CMU's vehicles were able to autonomously make short trips around the Pittsburgh area. By 1995, a CMU vehicle drove cross country 98.5% autonomously. This all happened in a period when most universities were becoming worse at managing complex systems projects. This interview dives into how exactly CMU pushed against the grain and turned itself into an autonomous vehicle research powerhouse.