Elon Musk, the founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of Tesla, recently revealed that an engineer of Indian origin was the first recruit for Tesla Autopilot.
Ashok Elluswamy, who is now the director of Autopilot Software at Tesla, was hired after Musk put out a tweet looking for candidates for the autopilot team. Elluswamy has been associated with the company for eight years.
“Ashok was the first person recruited from my tweet saying that Tesla is starting an Autopilot team!” Musk said on December 29, in response to a snippet shared on Twitter from one of his interviews.
The cars manufactured by Tesla are equipped with advanced hardware that is capable of supporting “autopilot features and full self-driving capabilities”, the company has said on its website.
Here are five things to know about Elluswamy, who leads the autonomy software team for Tesla Autopilot:
The Tesla employee is a robotics engineer with experience in computer vision and perception through planning and control, according to his LinkedIn profile
He earned his Bachelor of Engineering degree in Electronics and Communication from the College of Engineering, Guindy in Chennai.
He studied robotics systems development at the Carnegie Mellon University in the United States.
Before Tesla, he was associated with the WABCO Vehicle Control Systems and Volkswagen.
Elluswamy started working at Tesla in January 2014 as a software engineer for autopilot and was eventually promoted as director of Autopilot Software in 2019.