VaMP
The driverless vehicle VaMoRs ( experimental vehicle for autonomous mobility and computer vision ) Passenger Car (short vamp ) was one of the first truly autonomous automobiles along with its twin vehicle VITA -2. The vehicles could pass in heavy traffic with little human intervention over long distances and used this computer vision to quickly detect moving obstacles such as other vehicles to avoid them automatically or to overtake them.
The vamp was developed comprehensive EUREKA Prometheus Project (1987-1995) on autonomous vehicles by a team of Professor Ernst Dick 's at the Universität der Bundeswehr München in cooperation with Mercedes -Benz in the 1990s as part of the 800 million ECU. It was a Mercedes 500 SEL, which was modified so that steering, throttle and brakes could be operated by computer, prepares an evaluation of a real-time image sequences. Software relied sensor data into appropriate control commands to. Due to the limited computing power at that time computer sophisticated strategies of computer vision were needed to respond in real time. Dick 's ' team solved the problem by an innovative approach to dynamic computer vision. An attention control using artificial saccadic motion of the camera platform allowed the system to focus on the most important details of the visual input. Four cameras with two different focal lengths for each hemisphere were used in parallel. Kalman filters were to be expanded to allow for perspective vision and to achieve a stable autonomous driving even in the presence of noise and uncertainty. Sixty transputer, a special type of parallel computers have been used to cope with the huge computational requirements for the 1990 conditions.
In October 1994, the Vamp and his twin VITA -2 were the stars at the international final presentation of the Prometheus Project on the Auto Route 1 at Paris -Charles de Gaulle airport. With a safety driver and passengers put the two vehicles more than 1000 km in normal traffic on a three-lane highway at speeds up to 130 km / h back. They demonstrated changing lanes in both directions and outdated autonomously after approval by the safety driver other vehicles.
A year later drove the VAMP 1758 km far from Munich to Copenhagen and back in normal traffic, overtaking even planned it and carried it out after release by a security driver. Only in some critical situations, such as in the Software not modeled highway construction sites took over the security driver complete control. Again, active computer vision used to evaluate the rapidly changing street scenes. The vehicle reached on the German Autobahn speeds over 175 km / h with an average distance of 9 km between human interventions. The longest distance without human intervention route was 158 km, although the research prototype had placed no special emphasis on long-range reliability.
Most robotic vehicles use today as well as driver assistance systems, the GPS to determine exactly where they are located. The vamp used, in contrast, no GPS, but relied exclusively on visual information.
Vamp and VITA -2 have many hardware and software concepts presented prototype, which are important for autonomous robots. You have left a big impression on many observers, and strongly influenced the research on robot vehicles and issued for funding. Since May 2006, the vamp in the Deutsches Museum in Munich to visit.