"Today, we are in a state where a car can drive 100 miles... before human assistance is necessary."
Dr. Sebastian Thrun, Stanford University
As professor at the Universitat der Bundeswehr Munchen, Ernst Dieter Dickmanns (b. 1936) and his team designed a fully automated, driverless vehicle. They equipped a van with a series of cameras and sensors that processed images of the changing scenery and relayed the information to a mechanism that controlled the steering, accelerator, and brakes.
This was not the first autonomous vehicle to drive unmanned. Nearly a decade earlier, the Tsukuba Mechanical Engineering Lab in Japan created an automobile that could travel around a specially designed and clearly marked course at speeds of up to 18 miles (30 km) per hour. But in 1986 Dickmanns's van did a lot better, navigating its way around ordinary (albeit empty) roads, attaining a top speed of about 60 miles (100 km) per hour the following year.
The European Commission began to fund a research and development project called PROMETHEUS. Dickmanns made huge advances in the eight years it was active. The final demonstration of the project involved two re-engineered Mercedes 500 SEL models driving 620 miles (1,000 km) on the multilane autoroutes in Paris. The VAmP and its twin, Vita-2, reached speeds of 80 miles (130 km) per hour and were successfully programmed to move into th fast lanes automatically to overtake slow vehicles.
