[4] Thrun led development of the robotic vehicle Stanley[5] which won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, and which has since been placed on exhibit in the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History.

At the University of Bonn, he completed a Diplom (first degree) in 1993 and a Ph.D. (summa cum laude) in 1995 in computer science and statistics.

Thrun left CMU in July 2003 to become an associate professor at Stanford University and was appointed as the director of SAIL in January 2004.

In 1997 Thrun and his colleagues Wolfram Burgard and Dieter Fox developed the world's first robotic tour guide in the Deutsches Museum Bonn (1997).

In 1998, the follow-up robot "Minerva" was installed in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., where it guided tens of thousands of visitors during a two-week deployment period.

Thrun went on to found the CMU/Pitt Nursebot project, which fielded an interactive humanoid robot in a nursing home near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

In 2002, Thrun helped develop mine mapping robots in a project with his colleagues William L. Whittaker and Scott Thayer, research professors at Carnegie Mellon University.

In the fall of 2005, Thrun published a textbook entitled Probabilistic Robotics together with his long-term co-workers Dieter Fox and Wolfram Burgard.