1,600 km Munich to Odense, 95 percent autonomous
In November 1995 VaMP drove more than 1,600 km from Munich to Odense for a project meeting and back with autonomous longitudinal and lateral guidance on black-and-white images: by the group's estimate about 95 percent of the distance was covered fully automatically. On a free stretch of Autobahn in the Lüneburg Heath the speed reached 180 km/h; five times the vehicle ran more than 100 km without any intervention, the longest stretch being about 160 km; more than 400 lane changes were performed autonomously on the safety driver's command; lateral deviation from the lane centre rarely exceeded 0.2 m.
Why it matters
This is the first run from which a vision system got statistics over thousands of kilometres rather than a demonstration stretch, and the group itself drew six things the next system lacked: a wider field of view, stereo nearby, a tele lens for distant obstacles, more robust features, colour, and self-assessment of quality at every level. Together VaMoRs and VaMP had accumulated about 10,000 km of autonomous driving by 1997.
The computing was a transputer system with PowerPC 601 processors for feature extraction, an order of magnitude more power per processor; the rear hemisphere was not observed by machine vision in this version, which is why a person triggered the lane changes. Speeds varied between 60 and 180 km/h, the usual ones between 80 and 130; at the top speed the safety driver was in charge of early detection of distant obstacles. The group's site presents the run as a response to the crossing of America by CMU's Navlab 5 earlier that year, where the computer controlled only the lateral motion; that is the group's statement, not a fact checked here. Discrepancies: one page of the group's site gives the top speed as 175 km/h, another page of the same site and the IJCAI-97 paper say 180; the record takes 180 and names both. The often-quoted 1,758 km and 158 km are absent from the sources read, which say more than 1,600 km and about 160 km. The brief named the destination as Copenhagen; both sources say Odense. What the record does not claim: the days of the run, the weather, or the number of people on board.