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Comment by blattimwind | Hacker News Reader

I believe one of the earliest non-guided (so actually autonomous) self driving cars was the Vamors by Dickmanns in the 80s. IIRC it used one or two racks stuffed with transputers to run the machine vision and control software. Later there was the Euroka project based off that.

> ... achieved in 1995, when Dickmanns´ re-engineered autonomous S-Class Mercedes-Benz took a 1,000 miles (1,600 km) trip from Munich in Bavaria to Copenhagen in Denmark and back, using saccadic computer vision and transputers to react in real time. The robot achieved speeds exceeding 175 kilometres per hour (109 mph) on the German Autobahn, with a mean time between human interventions of 9 kilometres (5.6 mi). In traffic it executed manoeuvres to pass other cars. Despite being a research system without emphasis on long distance reliability, it drove up to 158 kilometres (98 mi) without any human intervention.

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I worked the spring and summer of 1991 at Daimler-Benz as an intern on their autonomous vehicle (VITA, a 7-ish meter bus at the time). This was the 2nd generation bus and I think the immediate predecessor to the S-class mentioned in parent comment. We’d sometimes test in Munich or Turin with the other European auto marquees, but mostly tested on an abandoned stretch of Autobahn just outside of Stuttgart.

I worked on the vision system (as in [under the direction and guidance of my boss] wrote all the code to improve frame rate from 5Hz to 10Hz, double the processing resolution (to around 128x96 IIRC), and implemented Kalman filtering for preceding vehicle detection and ranging). System was built in Occam on Inmos transputers. Each was about $15K and roughly the power of a 486 but with fast, reliable message passing. We could auto drive (lane follow and distance keep only) using only vision, but not especially reliably; it would fault and give up every 3-15 minutes, depending on lighting and roadway conditions. Partially wet, drying roadways remained a big problem as I left at the end of the summer.

Really cool internship. Part of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_Prometheus_Project

VITA image: https://goo.gl/images/Cz8ZuZ

I wonder how fast did these companies ran to their archive department to find notes from that project when Google, Tesla et al started to pitch level5 auto-automation.

ps: Also did you know about the pseudo self driving system made in the US (50s) by embedding a radio wire in the road so the car above could stay in lane ?

Didn't know about the radio guidance; will have to google it.(I do know about the 4-course aviation radio nav systems, but am not old enough to have flown them.)

With regards to quickly searching the archives, I suspect all the major manufacturers have had a reasonably steady, perhaps varying in intensity, advanced research group. So, it's probably less searching the archives and rather just asking the grizzled engineers in those groups...

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