VaMP in dense traffic near Paris
In 1994, at the final demonstration of the European EUREKA project PROMETHEUS near Paris, the VaMP passenger car of the University of the Federal Armed Forces in Munich and Daimler-Benz's VITA-2 drove the A1 motorway in normally dense three-lane traffic at up to 130 km/h: free lane driving, convoy driving and lane changes for passing, with the decision whether a lane change was safe taken by the vehicle itself and a human safety pilot merely giving the go-ahead. VaMP watched the road with two camera pairs, front and rear, and tracked up to ten other vehicles out to about 100 m.
Why it matters
Autonomous driving moved from an empty road into real traffic among other cars, and the vehicle itself decided the manoeuvre. Dickmanns calls these two cars the first road vehicles of a new species, able to understand part of their environment and to react on their own.
By Dickmanns's IJCAI-97 paper, VaMP had 46 transputers processing 320 by 240 pixel images, two camera pairs with focal lengths of 7.5 and 24 mm (one looking forward, one to the rear), and in 1994 recognised road curvature, lane width and number of lanes, the type of lane markings, its own position in the lane and the relative state of up to five vehicles in each hemisphere together with their velocities. The group's site adds that this was the second-generation transputer system with up to 60 processors, with monocular motion stereo under a flat-ground assumption and an initial estimate of each other vehicle's width. The group described the demonstration at the Intelligent Vehicles '94 symposium in Paris in October 1994 (The Seeing Passenger Car VaMoRs-P); that paper was not read. What the record does not claim: the month and day of the demonstration, its total length (the often-quoted more than 1000 km is absent from the sources read) or the number of runs.