VaMP
Encyclopedia
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 brake
s 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 filter
s were extended to handle perspective imaging and to achieve robust autonomous driving even in the presence of noise
and uncertainty
. Sixty transputers, a special breed of parallel computer
s, were used to deal with the enormous (by 1990s standards) computational demands.
In 1994, the VaMP and its twin VITA-2 were stars of the final international presentation of the PROMETHEUS project in October 1994 on Autoroute 1 near the Charles-de-Gaulle airport in Paris
. With a safety driver and guests onboard, the twins drove more than 1000 km in normal traffic
on the three-lane highway at speeds up to 130 km/h. They demonstrated lane changes left and right, autonomously passing other cars after maneuver approval by the safety driver.
One year later, the autonomous Mercedes-Benz drove more than 1000 miles (1,609.3 km) from Munich to Copenhagen
and back in traffic at up to 180 km/h, again planning and executing maneuvers to pass other cars with safety driver approval. However, only in a few critical situations (such as unmodeled construction areas) a safety driver took over completely. Again, active computer vision was used to deal with rapidly changing street scenes. The car achieved speeds exceeding 175 km/h on the German
Autobahn, with a mean
distance between human interventions of 9 km. Despite being a research system without emphasis on long distance reliability, it drove up to 158 km without any human intervention.
Most current robot cars as well as commercial vehicles with driver assistance use GPS
so that they know precisely where they are. However, the VaMP did not use GPS, and relied on vision only.
The VaMP and VITA-2 projects pioneered many hardware and software concepts that are essential for autonomous robots. They left a big impression on many observers and heavily influenced robot car research and funding decisions worldwide. Since May 2006, VaMP is on display at the Deutsches Museum
in Munich
, Germany
.
Driverless car
An autonomous car, also known as robotic or informally as driverless, is an autonomous vehicle capable of fulfilling the human transportation capabilities of a traditional car. As an autonomous vehicle, it is capable of sensing its environment and navigating on its own...
was one of the first truly autonomous
Autonomy
Autonomy is a concept found in moral, political and bioethical philosophy. Within these contexts, it is the capacity of a rational individual to make an informed, un-coerced decision...
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
Computer vision
Computer vision is a field that includes methods for acquiring, processing, analysing, and understanding images and, in general, high-dimensional data from the real world in order to produce numerical or symbolic information, e.g., in the forms of decisions...
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
Ernst Dickmanns
Ernst Dieter Dickmanns is a former professor at Bundeswehr University Munich , and a pioneer of dynamic computer vision and of driverless cars. Dickmanns has been visiting professor to CalTech, Pasadena, and to MIT, Boston teaching courses on 'dynamic vision'.- Biography :Dickmanns was born in 1936...
at the Bundeswehr University of Munich and Mercedes-Benz
Mercedes-Benz
Mercedes-Benz is a German manufacturer of automobiles, buses, coaches, and trucks. Mercedes-Benz is a division of its parent company, Daimler AG...
in the 1990s as part of the 800 million ECU EUREKA Prometheus Project
EUREKA Prometheus Project
The EUREKA Prometheus Project was the largest R&D project ever in the field of driverless cars. In today's money it received more than 1 billion dollars of funding from the European Commission, and defined the state of the art of autonomous vehicles...
on autonomous vehicles (1987–1995). It was a 500 SEL Mercedes re-engineered such that it was possible to control steering wheel
Steering wheel
A steering wheel is a type of steering control in vehicles and vessels ....
, throttle
Throttle
A throttle is the mechanism by which the flow of a fluid is managed by constriction or obstruction. An engine's power can be increased or decreased by the restriction of inlet gases , but usually decreased. The term throttle has come to refer, informally and incorrectly, to any mechanism by which...
, and brake
Brake
A brake is a mechanical device which inhibits motion. Its opposite component is a clutch. The rest of this article is dedicated to various types of vehicular brakes....
s through computer
Computer
A computer is a programmable machine designed to sequentially and automatically carry out a sequence of arithmetic or logical operations. The particular sequence of operations can be changed readily, allowing the computer to solve more than one kind of problem...
commands based on real-time evaluation of image sequences. Software
Computer software
Computer software, or just software, is a collection of computer programs and related data that provide the instructions for telling a computer what to do and how to do it....
was written that translated sensory data into appropriate driving commands. Due to the limited computing power of the time period, sophisticated computer vision
Computer vision
Computer vision is a field that includes methods for acquiring, processing, analysing, and understanding images and, in general, high-dimensional data from the real world in order to produce numerical or symbolic information, e.g., in the forms of decisions...
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
Saccade
A saccade is a fast movement of an eye, head or other part of an animal's body or device. It can also be a fast shift in frequency of an emitted signal or other quick change. Saccades are quick, simultaneous movements of both eyes in the same direction...
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 filter
Kalman filter
In statistics, the Kalman filter is a mathematical method named after Rudolf E. Kálmán. Its purpose is to use measurements observed over time, containing noise and other inaccuracies, and produce values that tend to be closer to the true values of the measurements and their associated calculated...
s were extended to handle perspective imaging and to achieve robust autonomous driving even in the presence of noise
Noise
In common use, the word noise means any unwanted sound. In both analog and digital electronics, noise is random unwanted perturbation to a wanted signal; it is called noise as a generalisation of the acoustic noise heard when listening to a weak radio transmission with significant electrical noise...
and uncertainty
Uncertainty
Uncertainty is a term used in subtly different ways in a number of fields, including physics, philosophy, statistics, economics, finance, insurance, psychology, sociology, engineering, and information science...
. Sixty transputers, a special breed of parallel computer
Parallel computing
Parallel computing is a form of computation in which many calculations are carried out simultaneously, operating on the principle that large problems can often be divided into smaller ones, which are then solved concurrently . There are several different forms of parallel computing: bit-level,...
s, were used to deal with the enormous (by 1990s standards) computational demands.
In 1994, the VaMP and its twin VITA-2 were stars of the final international presentation of the PROMETHEUS project in October 1994 on Autoroute 1 near the Charles-de-Gaulle airport in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
. With a safety driver and guests onboard, the twins drove more than 1000 km in normal traffic
Traffic
Traffic on roads may consist of pedestrians, ridden or herded animals, vehicles, streetcars and other conveyances, either singly or together, while using the public way for purposes of travel...
on the three-lane highway at speeds up to 130 km/h. They demonstrated lane changes left and right, autonomously passing other cars after maneuver approval by the safety driver.
One year later, the autonomous Mercedes-Benz drove more than 1000 miles (1,609.3 km) from Munich to Copenhagen
Copenhagen
Copenhagen is the capital and largest city of Denmark, with an urban population of 1,199,224 and a metropolitan population of 1,930,260 . With the completion of the transnational Øresund Bridge in 2000, Copenhagen has become the centre of the increasingly integrating Øresund Region...
and back in traffic at up to 180 km/h, again planning and executing maneuvers to pass other cars with safety driver approval. However, only in a few critical situations (such as unmodeled construction areas) a safety driver took over completely. Again, active computer vision was used to deal with rapidly changing street scenes. The car achieved speeds exceeding 175 km/h on the German
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
Autobahn, with a mean
Arithmetic mean
In mathematics and statistics, the arithmetic mean, often referred to as simply the mean or average when the context is clear, is a method to derive the central tendency of a sample space...
distance between human interventions of 9 km. Despite being a research system without emphasis on long distance reliability, it drove up to 158 km without any human intervention.
Most current robot cars as well as commercial vehicles with driver assistance use GPS
Global Positioning System
The Global Positioning System is a space-based global navigation satellite system that provides location and time information in all weather, anywhere on or near the Earth, where there is an unobstructed line of sight to four or more GPS satellites...
so that they know precisely where they are. However, the VaMP did not use GPS, and relied on vision only.
The VaMP and VITA-2 projects pioneered many hardware and software concepts that are essential for autonomous robots. They left a big impression on many observers and heavily influenced robot car research and funding decisions worldwide. Since May 2006, VaMP is on display at the Deutsches Museum
Deutsches Museum
The Deutsches Museum in Munich, Germany, is the world's largest museum of technology and science, with approximately 1.5 million visitors per year and about 28,000 exhibited objects from 50 fields of science and technology. The museum was founded on June 28, 1903, at a meeting of the Association...
in Munich
Munich
Munich The city's motto is "" . Before 2006, it was "Weltstadt mit Herz" . Its native name, , is derived from the Old High German Munichen, meaning "by the monks' place". The city's name derives from the monks of the Benedictine order who founded the city; hence the monk depicted on the city's coat...
, Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
.
See also
- Driverless carDriverless carAn autonomous car, also known as robotic or informally as driverless, is an autonomous vehicle capable of fulfilling the human transportation capabilities of a traditional car. As an autonomous vehicle, it is capable of sensing its environment and navigating on its own...
- VIACVIACVIAC, the VisLab Intercontinental Autonomous Challenge, is the challenge conceived by VisLabas an extremetest ofautonomous vehicles.It ran from July 26, 2010 to October 28, 2010, involving four driverless vehicles driving with...
the Intercontinental Autonomous Challenge of 2010 - Highlights of robot car history by Juergen Schmidhuber
- EUREKA Prometheus ProjectEUREKA Prometheus ProjectThe EUREKA Prometheus Project was the largest R&D project ever in the field of driverless cars. In today's money it received more than 1 billion dollars of funding from the European Commission, and defined the state of the art of autonomous vehicles...
- DARPA Grand ChallengeDARPA Grand ChallengeThe DARPA Grand Challenge is a prize competition for driverless vehicles, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the most prominent research organization of the United States Department of Defense...
- ARGO Project on autonomous cars
- ELROB trials
- The BRAiVE autonomous car
- The Cognitive Autonomous Vehicles of UniBwM: VaMoRs, VaMP and MuCAR-3
- Citeseer entry
- IEEE Xplore entry
- Conference contribution