Chris Urmson

Chris Urmson co-founded Aurora Innovation with Sterling Anderson, the former director of Tesla Autopilot, and Drew Bagnell, Uber's former autonomy and perception lead. Aurora Innovation focuses on driverless car software, data, and hardware, aiming to integrate machine learning into motion planning and perception components of vehicle autonomy. As the CEO of Aurora, Urmson continues to advance the field of autonomous vehicles, shaping the future of freight transportation. He is the 2024 Mobility Innovator Award recipient.

Urmson is an engineer known for his significant contributions to self-driving car technology. Initially a faculty member at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, he focused on motion planning and perception for robotic vehicles, contributing to projects that included large autonomous trucks and robotics in desert environments. In 2007, he served as the director of technology for the Carnegie Mellon team that won the DARPA Urban Challenge. Urmson earned his PhD from Carnegie Mellon in 2005 and his BSc in computer engineering from the University of Manitoba in 1998.

He was the former Director of Self-Driving Cars at Google, where he led the self-driving car program from 2009, achieving over three quarters of a million miles driven by the team's vehicles under his leadership. During his tenure, his team developed early models including a driverless Prius and later progressed to building vehicles from the ground up designed specifically for autonomous driving. Urmson took over from Sebastian Thrun as project lead in 2013 and continued until his departure in 2016.