Eureka Prometheus Project

The EUREKA Prometheus Project (Programme for a European Traffic of Highest Efficiency and Unprecedented Safety, 1987-1995 ) was the biggest research and development project on driverless cars. Converted to today numbers more than a billion dollars have been invested by the European Community. Many universities and car manufacturers took part in the project.

Prometheus benefited from the participation of Ernst Dick Mann, a pioneer of driverless vehicles, and his team at the University of the Federal Armed Forces Munich, and his collaboration with Daimler -Benz. A first peak point was reached in 1994, when their two robot vehicles vamp and VITA -2 ( based on the 500 SEL) more than 1000 kilometers on a multi-lane highway in Paris in normal traffic at speeds up to 130 km / h laid back. Thus, they proved that automatic driving can be performed autonomously on multiple tracks, convoy driving, automatic tracking of other vehicles, lane changing and overtaking maneuvers.

The next major success was achieved in 1995, when Dick 's ' Vamp to Odense and back autonomously put back a total of 1758 km from Munich. In this up to 175 km / h and automatically obsolete vehicles. A human operator controlled the actions of security. The greatest distance traveled without human intervention route was about 158 km; average every 9 km was a necessary intervention.

• Research Project
• Education and research in the European Union
• Robotics
• Automobile
• Prometheus