Google Drives Away With Tesla's Auto Pilot Engg. Manager Robert Rose

(RTTNews) - In a very quiet move that would have gone unnoticed but for a scrutiny into the LinkedIn profile, Google has lapped up Robert Rose, former autopilot software engineering manager of Tesla, as part of the company's Google Robotics unit.

Rose worked with Tesla for six months and led the development of its "Autopilot" project.

He has also served SpaceX for more than five years, where he was a software engineer on some of the first Falcon 9 flights. Rose eventually became the director of flight software for all of SpaceX.

Rose's role at Google is not clear. He is listed as a "software engineer" for the Google Robotics unit. The role could involve anything from Google's self-driving car program to jobs at the various other companies it owns. Whispers on the Street suggests that the appointment may not have to do with the driverless car venture.

Google forayed into Robotics with its acquisition of SCHAFT, Redwood Robotics, Meka Robotics and Boston Dynamics, all in December 2013. Boston Robotics, a military grade robotics company, is now owned by Alphabet, Google's holding company, and falls under the Google X projects.

Reports that emerged last month indicated that the Robotics unit could be a made a separate division under Alphabet. Earlier this year, Google unveiled a video showing Spot, a smaller version of Boston's giant Big Dog robot, skipping across an office and a rough terrain.

Following the resignation of Andy Rubin as the head of its Robotics unit in late 2014, it was led on an interim basis by James Kuffner and later by Jonathan Rosenberg.

Poaching has become very common in companies engaged in autonomous cars. Tesla, Apple and Google have all done it in the past.

In September, TrueCar's John Krafcik joined Google's self-driving car project, as its chief executive. Krafcik, an industry veteran, previously worked with Ford and Hyundai.