Autonomous Self-Driving Vehicles - Talk at AGI 2011 by E.D.Dickmanns

From 1990 - 1996 I worked with Prof. E.D.Dickmanns in Munich at the UniBW on developing a computer vision system for autonomous road vehicles. This was a great experience, and I also got my PhD degree from that work. It was therefore a delight to see a recent presentation given by my "doctor father" (that is how we call our PhD supervisors in Germany) about his work in computer vision based autonomous vehicles. I remember taking part in these technical demonstrations, for example the PROMETHEUS presentation in 1994 near Paris, and the road trip from Munich to Odense (Denmark) with my colleague Markus Maurer (now Professor at Uni Braunschweig). When the autonomous vehicle (a nice Mercedes 500 SEL) went with 180 km/h (110 mph) on the Autobahn near Lueneburg, we were quite a bit tense, hoping that the car would not suddenly decide to swerve to the side...

Here is Prof Dickmanns' talk, given at the recent http://agi-conf.org/2011/:

SciAutonics among Semi-Finalists in DARPA Grand Challenge!

As indicated earlier, DARPA announced on 9. August 2007 the 36 semi-finalists, which were selected after site visits to each of the teams. And, our team SciAutonics is among them!

Congratulations to the team, and best wishes for the remaining work!

I remember what a hard struggle this was in preparation for the first Grand Challenge in 2004...

Currently I am uploading photos about the DARPA Grand Challenge 2004 preparations from my large archive onto Flickr, placing them into a collection of several sets. The original RASCAL which is depicted in these pictures will no longer run; instead the team has now a more conventional vehicle, suitable for the anticipated urban scenario near Victorville.