Well, this sounds really interesting, I was just reading the wikipedia entry on Erns Dickmans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Dickmanns this and the project was truly fascinating. What did you do there? What did you end up doing afterwards?
At Daimler, I worked on the computer vision system, doubling the throughput (by adding more processing nodes primarily). IIRC, we went from ~12.5 Hz to about 25Hz. That was fairly straightforward, but I also added a lot of inter-frame aware filtering, created some graphical output changes to help us better understand what the system was doing internally at any given time. That was all in Occam on transputers. I think each card held two nodes and cost about $25K. Each node was about a 486-25.
We had a couple mile stretch of abandoned Autobahn a few miles away from our lab building that we would test on about once a week. (Other teams also needed the vehicle to test their systems.) We also took it to an abandoned airfield outside Munich for longer, higher-speed tests, and demos, and took it to Turin a few times for tests and pan-PROMETHEUS demos and world record runs. On a few of those test sessions, if our system was working well, I was also able to pitch in with other teams on control system algorithms, a radar ranging system, and lane/sign detection vision system work.
(This is all 23+ years old, so forgive some minor discrepancies.) It was a great experience all around! (You also got me to send a LinkedIn invite to my boss there, Dr Andreas Kuehnle, now at Bendix, so thanks for the followup Qs.)
When I came back and graduated, I interviewed at the US Big 3 (back when there were 3, they were big, and US... :) ) and a Ford engineer urged me to "go anyplace other than US auto". He said if I wanted to come back into motorsports or high-perf/speciality street vehicles that I was better off doing something else for 5 years and applying back directly into those units. I wish I had that guy's name and address as it was great advice.
Went to a few startups that failed, went to a motorsports simulation game company that was successful and bought by Sierra-Online, then went to a satellite office of DEShaw (a hedge fund), bounced around in finance, and finally ended up at Vistaprint a few years before we went public in 2005 and I'm still there and crazy happy.
I welcome any followup questions (for HN sake, followups on your former question are more interesting than the latter, but I'll answer either...)
During a test on the Munich airfield, we had had rain overnight, but that had stopped a few hours ago and the demos were going well. As my boss^3 (unsure if it was Herr Dickmanns or not) was on-board watching the demo, standing between my position mid-ship and the two front seats, and as we completed a turn from a taxiway onto a disused runway, I watched in horror as the vision system "locked on" to some prominent horizontal features provided by the uneven drying on the pavement. Almost immediately, this lock turned into a "valid" signal post-filtering and induced a panic stop of the bus. The boss^3 fell forward and it had to be very uncomfortable though didn't seem injurious.
After we came to a stop, the vehicle refused to move as our (my?) vision system was convinced there was a car immediately ahead. It was like a $2MM recalcitrant horse...
That day was not my best demo ever. ;)
I was asking what you wound up doing afterwards because I was personally curious what career trajectory one can expect going from such cool projects.(esp at that time)
It's really curious how this bit of history isn't that well known. I've only just heard about it 3 days ago. Since they have been working at it since the 80's, I would have expected Daimler to have the lead in the sdc game. How brilliant were the people working on it at the time? How come they didn't try to hit the market with what they had? I guess it wasn't feasible in '92, but I see the project running till' at least 2005, so I guess they could have tried putting some commercial applications of it out.
I believe that you could directly trace some of the lab work our group did to Distronic (adaptive cruise control) and Parktronic (parking assist) in Mercedes road cars over the years. I doubt any of my personal work can be directly traced to a shipping feature in a production car, but I still learned a ton (and I believe contributed a lot as well).
I'd love to learn more about auto firmware, especially as I've gotten into hardware and electronics a bit more as a hobbyist, but my sense is that the auto industry cares deeply about COGS and that probably drives a lot of their seemingly inefficient decision-making. (Firmware writing is NRE, module and ECU production is COGS and if you sell enough units, COGS dominates.)
I don't know you can extrapolate from anyone's career path, due to the insane amount of randomness in outcomes and choices, but if you're "good with computers", there's probably never been a better time to be in the field, especially since I'd basically do it for free (given what I do for hobbies).
"The grass is always greener" is a very real thing, so don't be in a huge hurry to jump fields/sub-fields/companies assuming that it's just your particular company that has flaws. They all do. ;)
At one time I was writing some firmware and it was very fun, but it felt sort of pointless, since I'm sure someone else should have already solved that problem at least once in the past in the same company. So they keep reinventing the wheel, with each product, with each car.
It was very educational for me, but I'd love that once something is good, let's build on it... make it better, expand it. It could use from more transparency or some (internal, in the least) transition to a kind of opensource model within the company, where the good code survives and evolves and the bad one gets left behind...