VaMoRs drives the Autobahn at 96 km/h
In 1987 VaMoRs, a 5-ton Mercedes van that Ernst Dickmanns's group at the University of the Federal Armed Forces in Munich had fitted with cameras and processors, made autonomous runs on a free Autobahn at up to 96 km/h, with both steering and speed under computer vision. A year earlier the same vehicle had shown longitudinal and lateral guidance by vision on Daimler-Benz's skidpan in Stuttgart at up to 10 m/s (36 km/h). Dickmanns and Zapp reported the results at the 10th IFAC World Congress in Munich in 1987.
Why it matters
Autonomous driving left the laboratory room for a road built for cars, at a speed people drive on it. This is the European start of the driving line, which in this atlas had begun with Mobileye in 1999; ALVINN at Carnegie Mellon would drive 400 metres of wooded path at half a metre per second the following year.
The figures come from the timeline on the group's site, written by its leader in 2020, and from his survey paper at IJCAI-97, which calls VaMoRs the 5-ton van in operation since 1985 and cites the 1987 paper as Autonomous High Speed Road Vehicle Guidance by Computer Vision, 10th IFAC World Congress Munich, Preprint Vol. 4, pages 232-237. The IFAC paper itself could not be read: its page on sciencedirect.com shows a captcha, which was not worked around. The group's method is the 4-D approach: recursive state estimation (an extended Kalman filter) with spatio-temporal models of the road and the vehicle, rather than processing each frame afresh. By the group's site, in 1988 the vehicle drove lower-order roads by night and in rain and stopped in front of a large stationary obstacle from 40 km/h, and in 1992 it was certified for fully autonomous driving in general public traffic on all types of roads with at least three persons on board. What the record does not claim: the length of the stretch (the often-quoted 20 km is absent from the sources read), the number of runs, the month, or that the road was open to other traffic (the site says free Autobahn).