Self-driving car pioneer Sebastian Thrun has shifted
his gaze to the skies, as his Silicon Valley online school Udacity launches what
it calls the first “nanodegree” in flying car engineering.
With companies from Airbus
and Amazon to Uber throttling up development of their own autonomous aerial
vehicles, Thrun believes “in a few years time, this will be the hottest topic
on the planet.”
As usual, Thrun intends to
be on the cutting edge of this emerging technology.
The 50-year-old PhD
computer scientist and former Stanford University professor, co-founded Udacity
in 2012 and says the online school’s self-driving car programme has attracted
50,000 applicants since 2016. He expects the new flying car curriculum, which
opens in late February and began taking applications from Tuesday, to draw at
least 10,000.
Udacity is offering two
12-week terms, at $1,200 each, including a course in Aerial Robotics and one in
Intelligent Air Systems, that provide an online certification in a fraction of
the time of a traditional degree course.
In an interview, Thrun
said his motivation in creating the flying-car programme was similar to what
drove the school’s widely publicised self-driving car course.
Thrun said “it’s almost
impossible to hire qualified people” to design and engineer future vehicles —
both terrestrial and aerial — that employ advanced technology, including
robotics, artificial intelligence and machine learning. “There is a huge
shortage of engineers. There are plenty of smart people — the missing link is
education,” said Thrun, who headed the team that launched Google’s self-driving
car project, since renamed Waymo.
Thrun remains an advisor
to Google parent Alphabet Inc and retains close ties to Alphabet CEO and
co-founder Larry Page.
Page is an investor in
Kitty Hawk Corp, a two-year-old startup based in California, whose stated
mission is “to make the dream of personal flight a reality.”
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