| Body Measurement | – |
| Body type | – |
| Height | 6’0″ |
| Weight | 62 kg |
| Hair Color | Black |
| Eye Color | Dark Brown |
| Shoe Size | 14 (US) |
| Full Name | Anthony Levandowski |
| Nickname | Anthony |
| Gender | Male |
| Date of Birth | March 15, 1980 |
| Age | 43 Years |
| Profession | self-driving car engineer |
| Anthony Levandowski Net Worth | $200 Million |
| Education | University of California, Berkeley |
| Nationality | American |
| Birthplace | Brussels, Belgium |
| Hometown | Brussels, Belgium |
| Religion | Christian |
| Zodiac Sign | Pisces |
| Father | – |
| Mother | – |
| Spouse | Stacy |
| Children | 2 children |
| Siblings | 10 siblings |
| Website | anthonylevandowski.com/ |
| twitter.com/antlevandowski |
Childhood & Early Life
Levandowski was born in Brussels, Belgium, on March 15, 1980. His mother was a French minister and his father was an American businessman. In the middle of the 1990s, he went to California. He made websites for small businesses when he was a teenager.
Levandowski started going to the University of California, Berkeley, in 1998. There, he got bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research.
He started La Raison as a freshman. It was an intranet and IT services business that made $50,000 in its first year.
In his second year of high school, Levandowski put together the BillSortBot, a robot made of 300 Lego pieces that sorted Monopoly money for a Sun Microsoft challenge.
He came in first. Levandowski and Randy Miller started building Control Systems in 2003 to make WorkTop, a portable device for building sites that reads and updates blueprints.
When Levandowski and some other engineers from Berkeley got together in 2003, they formed the “Blue Team” and began making a driverless motorcycle called “Ghost Rider” for the 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge.
The Ghost Rider motorbike used to be a Honda RX. It took several years and cost about $100,000 to build. In 2004 and 2005, it participated in the DARPA Grand Challenge. It was the only self-driving two-wheeled car in the test.
After the fact, video cameras, computers, a GPS receiver, an IMU, and motors for the clutch and steering were added to the motorbike. Levandowski worked with his team to build PriBot, the first self-driving car that could drive on public roads.
This was possible because they were in the DARPA Grand Challenge. The Ghost Rider was given by Levandowski to the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in 2007 and is now kept there.
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Career
Levandowski started working on VueTool in 2006 alongside Sebastian Thrun, whom he had met at the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge. A Stanford street mapping project called Vuetool produced maps by mounting cameras on moving cars.
To aid in the development of the Google Street View system, Google X recruited Levandowski, Thrun, and their entire team in the beginning of 2007.
Levandowski placed an order for 100 Toyota Priuses from a nearby dealership in order to fulfil Larry Page’s goal of obtaining 1,000,000 kilometres (620,000 mi) of roads before the end of 2007.
The “Topcon box” or IP-S2 Mobile Mapping System, a roof-mounted box with Lidar, cameras, GPS, IMUs, and wheel encoders that let a car to drive around and build a 3D map, played a part in the success of the Street View team.
510 Systems, a startup that Levandowski co-founded in early 2007 with Pierre-Yves Droz and Andrew Schultz, built the Topcon box. 510 Systems technology was used by Google until it was bought covertly by the business in 2011.
Levandowski and Thrun were co-founders of Google’s Chauffeur project in 2009; the project is now called Waymo. Levandowski’s 510 Systems produced five more self-driving Priuses for Google over the course of the following two years.
Levandowski persuaded Nevada to permit autonomous car testing in 2011. The first self-driving automobile test was conducted by the Las Vegas DMV in May 2012, with Chris Urmson driving and Anthony Levandowski in the passenger seat.
The vehicle cleared the test. Up until January 2016, when he left to start Otto, Levandowski remained a technical lead on Google’s self-driving car project, collaborating with Chris Urmson, Dmitri Dolgov, and Mike Montemerlo.
Levandowski worked on Street View, Cardboard, Telepresence, Ground Truth, Oblique Aerial Imagery, and Tiramisu at Google in addition to Project Chauffeur. It is said that Levandowski downloaded 9.7 GB of Waymo’s proprietary files prior to leaving to create Otto.
Levandowski, Lior Ron, Claire Delaunay, and Don Burnette established Otto in January 2016. Eleven workers from Google joined them as well. Otto installed self-driving equipment on large rig trucks.
According to Levandowski, he “was eager to commercialise a self-driving vehicle as quickly as possible” which is why he departed Google. After Uber purchased Otto in late July 2016, Levandowski took over as the company’s autonomous car operations’ head.
Levandowski was let go from Uber in May 2017 following accusations from Google and Waymo that he had broken into Waymo’s design server. Uber’s programme for autonomous trucks was discontinued in July 2018.
In order to develop a camera-based, self-driving highway-only retrofit system for semi-trucks, Levandowski established Pronto AI in 2018.
According to Levandwoski’s 2019 bankruptcy filings, he contributed more than $8.5 million to the business. Levandowski asserted that he drove a modified self-driving Prius 3,100 miles (5,000 km) across the US as proof of concept.
A few publications questioned the veracity of the footage. Because the video was posted as a timelapse, Engadget pointed out that it was challenging to confirm the footage.
By 2022, the business has changed its focus to creating self-driving cars for restricted applications in places like quarries.
Levandowski introduced Pollen Mobile, an open-source wireless network, in February 2022. Customers received antennas and other gadgets from Pollen Mobile under the names Flowers, Hummingbirds, and Bumblebees.
The network is operating in the Bay Area and is utilised by Pronto AI’s autonomous vehicles
Levandowski doubted that self-driving cars would become widely adopted in the near future in October 2022.
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major Works/filmography
Anthony used BillSortBot, a robot that sorts Monopoly money, to win the Sun Java Robotics competition while he was a student at UC Berkeley.
Later, in 2004 for the DARPA Grand Challenge, he constructed the first autonomous motorcycle, Ghostrider, which is currently kept at the Smithsonian.
Later, Anthony founded 510 Systems, a mobile mapping startup whose technology was utilised by Google, Navtech, Microsoft, and others.
In 2008, he established Anthony’s Robots, which gained notoriety for creating PriBot, an autonomous self-driving Prius that transported a pizza from San Francisco to Treasure Island via the Bay Bridge.
Additionally, Anthony created the lasers that aid in the “seeing” of self-driving cars. 510 Systems and Anthony’s Robots were later purchased by Google in 2012.
Anthony joined Google in 2007 to work on creating the Street View vehicle fleet, which started the company’s internal mapping initiative. In addition, he served as a technical lead and cofounder of Google’s autonomous vehicle project.
Anthony departed Google earlier in 2016 to co-found Otto, a business whose mission is to reinvent transportation, beginning with driverless vehicles.
Awards and Achievements
While a student at UC Berkeley, Anthony won the Sun Java Robotics competition with BillSortBot, a robot that sorts Monopoly money
Anthony Levandowski Net Worth
Anthony Levandowski, an American-French engineer, once possessed a net worth of $50 to $200 million. However, a $179 million judgment against Google in 2020 led to his bankruptcy, revealing assets of $50 to $100 million and liabilities of $100 to $500 million.
By 2022, he reached a settlement with Google and Uber, with an owed sum of $25 to $30 million.
Controversy
The Department of Justice filed charges against Levandowski on August 27, 2019, alleging that he stole trade secrets from Waymo, Google’s autonomous driving division.
The accusations stated that Levandowski copied thousands of data from Project Chauffeur, Waymo’s predecessor, in the months prior to his departure from Google.
Before departing the firm, Levandowski allegedly moved files onto his laptop containing “critical engineering information about the hardware used on Project Chauffeur self-driving vehicles.”
Robbie Miller, the Chief Safety Officer of Pronto, a newly formed self-driving trucking firm that Levandowski co-founded, was named CEO after the indictment.
Levandowski consented to enter a guilty plea to one of the thirty-three charges that the Department of Justice had first filed against him on March 19, 2020.
Levandowski admitted guilt to downloading an internal project tracking document named “Chauffeur TL Weekly – Q4 2015“—a spreadsheet with team goals, project metrics, and weekly status updates that Levandowski’s team could access on an unsecured Google Drive.
Levandowski was initially accused of stealing documents containing trade secrets, technical specifications, and Lidar design.
In February 2016, Levandowski disclosed that he had accessed the document around one month after quitting Google.
Levandowski formally entered a guilty plea to one count of trade secret theft on August 4, 2020, and Judge William Alsup sentenced him to eighteen months in jail. As part of the plea deal, the prosecution consented to remove the final 32 counts.
Alsup remarked, “This is the biggest trade secret crime I have ever seen,” during the sentencing. It was no trivial matter.
The scope of this was enormous.” Levandowski was a “brilliant, groundbreaking engineer that our country needs,” the speaker added. We require those with a clear vision. I will provide that to him.”
Levandowski was also sentenced to serve time and pay a $95,000 fine in addition to $756,499.22 in restitution to Waymo.
Levandowski was fully pardoned by President Donald Trump on January 20, 2021, the last day of his presidency.
10 things you didn’t know about Anthony Levandowski!
FAQs
– What experience does Anthony Levandowski have with self-driving cars?
Levandowski was a key figure in the advancement of autonomous technology. He worked on projects at Waymo, Google’s autonomous vehicle division, before starting Otto, an autonomous trucking business.
– What is Otto, and what is its significance?
Anthony Levandowski co-founded the self-driving truck firm Otto in 2016. The company’s goal was to create long-haul truck autonomous technology. Otto became well-known after Uber purchased it in 2016.
– Why did Anthony Levandowski face legal issues related to Waymo and Uber?
Waymo, a division of Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company, filed a lawsuit against Levandowski in 2017. Levandowski was accused by Waymo of stealing trade secrets pertaining to autonomous vehicle technology when he left the company to found Otto, which Uber later purchased. This resulted in a well-publicized legal dispute.
– What was the outcome of the legal battle between Waymo and Uber?
In 2018, Waymo and Uber reached a settlement in which Uber promised not to exploit Waymo’s proprietary information for its autonomous vehicle technology in exchange for a monetary payment. Levandowski personally participated in the settlement as well. He eventually entered a guilty plea to charges of stealing trade secrets.
