Google Snags Former Tesla Autopilot Engineering Manager Robert Rose

Reports emerged this week that Robert Rose (who most recently helped Tesla launch its Autosteer and Autopilot features) recently accepted a job with Google. Rose is clearly not attached to the Boston Dynamics rather autonomous team under the Google mothership.

The site says Rose, a former game developer from OR, moved to California and joined the SpaceX family in 2009 as its lead software engineer.

In an interview with Nvidia last March, Tesla’s chief Elon Musk said the switch from cars today to self driving “cars of the future” won’t happen “overnight” but he believes that at this rate, the transition might happen in the next 20 years.

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But for Tesla, developing a fully autonomous system is even more urgent because the people are already pushing Autopilot’s capabilities to the extreme. According to Rose’s LinkedIn profile, Rose now works at Google Robotics, and lest you think he’s working on robotic dogs, it’s worth noting that many of Google’s self-driving auto engineers reportedly refer to themselves as “robotics software engineers”.

Rose also spent the better part of six years working at another Elon Musk endeavor, SpaceX. For instance that Tesla’s Robert Rose was quietly hired by Google.

Earlier this year, for instance, the battery company A123 Systems filed a lawsuit against Apple accusing the tech giant of poaching several of its top engineers. If Google wants to make the cars safe as self-directed taxis, it’s a good idea to make sure they don’t hit anyone stumbling out of a bar or looking at their phones. On the other hand, Tesla’s cars are not completely autonomous. Tesla has said the technology allows its Model S vehicles to steer, change lanes and manage speeds in mostly autonomous fashion.

Poaching employees has also become something of a back-and-forth match between Apple, Google and Tesla among others.