VaMP

The VaMP driverless car was one of the first truly autonomous cars along with its twin vehicle, the VITA-2. They were able to drive in heavy traffic for long distances without human intervention, using computer vision to recognize rapidly moving obstacles such as other cars, and automatically avoid and pass them.

The VaMP was constructed by the team of Ernst Dickmanns at the Bundeswehr University of Munich and Mercedes-Benz in the 1990s as part of the 800 million ECU EUREKA Prometheus Project on autonomous vehicles (1987–1995). It was a 500 SEL Mercedes re-engineered such that it was possible to control steering wheel, throttle, and brakes through computer commands based on real-time evaluation of image sequences. Software was written that translated sensory data into appropriate driving commands. Due to the limited computing power of the time period, sophisticated computer vision strategies were necessary to react in real time. The Dickmanns team solved the problem through an innovative approach to dynamic computer vision. Attention control including artificial saccadic movements of the platform carrying the cameras allowed the system to focus its attention on the most relevant details of the visual input. Four cameras with two different focal lengths for each hemisphere were used in parallel for this purpose. Kalman filters were extended to handle perspective imaging and to achieve robust autonomous driving even in the presence of noise and uncertainty. Sixty transputers, a type of parallel computers, were used to deal with the enormous (by 1990s standards) computational demands.

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