Michael Montemerlo
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Michael Montemerlo made contributions to the field of efficient probabilistic methods for mobile robots. He attended Carnegie Mellon University, where he earned his bachelor's degree (1997), master's degree (1997), and PhD (2003). His thesis advisors were William L. Whittaker and Sebastian Thrun, both of whom would direct the winning teams in the DARPA Grand Challenge.
Under Thrun, Montemerlo became leader of the team that wrote the software for Stanley, an autonomous Volkswagen of Stanford University that won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, ahead of four other autonomous cars finishing the course. Since the race was generally viewed as a software competition rather than a hardware competition, the work of Montemerlo and his team gained wide recognition as the essential reason for this remarkable success.
