PJ Vogt

And now there's also Stanford's entrant.

Compared to Sandstorm, the bulked-up Hummer, the car looks measly.

A blue SUV donated by Volkswagen.

A baby-faced Thrun smiles next to his soccer-mom-looking vehicle.

And Thrun really brought more artificial intelligence, which at the time, we're talking 2005,

was still rather primitive, especially compared to what we have today.

But he could use it to teach his vehicle how to recognize the road and how to do it much faster.

They found a dirt road out near Stanford and they drive it down a dirt road and have the car's cameras record what they were seeing.

the robot Stanley was able to train itself as it ran.

And the way it worked is its eyes looked way ahead and it could see stuff way at a distance.

When it drives over the stuff, it could tell if it was a good place to drive or not because it could measure how slippery or how bumpy the road was.

And then it could then retroactively train itself and say, this green stuff over there, it's something good to drive on, aka grass.

And this brownish stuff, aka mud, is not so good to drive.

And so it was able to detect patterns and generalize from what it had learned?

Yeah, absolutely.

And it did this like 30 times a second.

I mean, just like a person.

The race kicks off with Stanley sandwiched between Carnegie Mellon's two behemoths.

Highlander leads the pack, followed by Stanley and Sandstorm.

What happens in the second race?