
Ernst Dickmanns, a German scientist who developed self-driving cars in the 1980s - omnibrain
https://www.politico.eu/article/delf-driving-car-born-1986-ernst-dickmanns-mercedes/
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dubbel
A professor of mine who worked on the project as a PhD student once told us
about the project: According to him they had to use the heavily armored
version of the car, intended to protect presidents, and strip out all the
amour, because only this car platform could carry the enormous weight of the
computers at the time.

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RealityVoid
The first version was basically a bus loaded with 486's .

~~~
stephengillie
They must have needed huge batteries - or could the bus engine power a large
enough inverter to power all the 486s?

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gsich
why an inverter? I don't think DC-AC-DC is more efficient then DC-DC.

~~~
stephengillie
The bus alternator produces up to 80 amps at 20 volts - while the computer
needs 12, 5, and 3.3 volts, in the 1-20 amp range. Using a common inverter and
a common power supply is the cheapest way to convert the voltage.

~~~
chrisdhoover
Bus altenator is 24VDC? Plus charging voltage so a 27.6v output?

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RealityVoid
The Prometheus project is one of the most interesting projects almost nobody
seems to know about. It is incredibly impressive and one of the most memorable
and interesting interactions I've ever had on HN was with the user sokoloff,
that recounted his time being an intern for the PROMETHEUS project:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10328687](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10328687)

~~~
lnsru
One of these cars is displayed in German museum in Munich (Deutsches Museum
Verkehrszentrum). I visit it every time when I go there. It’s very
unspectacular big gray Mercedes loaded with old computers. Back then it was a
huge improvement from 8 MHz 68k processors. We have now a huge improvement
from 100 MHz to these in GHz range operating GPUs. Is it enough to solve this
problem? Or will it take another 30 years?

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mysterydip
I was recently reading up on GM's firebird concept/research cars from the 50s
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_Firebird](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_Firebird)

One of the features envisioned at the time:

> It also featured a sophisticated guidance system intended for use with "the
> highway of the future," where an electrical wire embedded in the roadway
> would send signals that would help guide future cars and avoid accidents.

So the idea has been around for a long time, approached from different
directions.

~~~
scotty79
The idea is as old as a car because with a horse and cart you could doze off
and trust the horse on usual routes.

I wouldn't be surprised if at some point someone tried to train animals to do
the driving and achieved modest success.

~~~
stephengillie
We found that humans are the best animals to train for this:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_driver](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_driver)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chauffeur](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chauffeur)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxi_Driver](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxi_Driver)

~~~
scotty79
Obviously. But lazy buggers won't drive me cheap enough. ;-)

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squirrelicus
It surprises many non techies I talk to (and techies too) to learn that AI
hasn't really come very far in a few decades. We're a bit faster (by orders of
magnitude to be sure), but AI "summers" are characterized primarily by it
being a bit cheaper to put old limited things in products, and not by some
abstract march of tech progress.

Given Moore's law, I'd be surprised if we ever see another AI summer after the
current one peters out.

~~~
gambiting
In the 60s, there was a rather famous project where scientists thought that
solving image recognition will take them few months at most. It's 2018 and the
best algorithms on the planet will answer with 99% confidence that a sofa in a
zebra print is in fact, a zebra, unless they were very specifically trained
against this scenario.

I feel this exact same thing is happening with autonomous cars - yes, it's
possible to get them to be extremely good at recognising the road and
surroundings - but the last few percent, those crucial few percent that make
the technology actually usable, I don't see those happening for another 50
years at least.

~~~
nostrademons
My unpopular (to me, even) prediction is that wartime will be the catalyst
that makes self-driving cars ubiquitous. In times of peace having a car that
kills its occupant even 1/10,000 of the time is unacceptable. In times of war
having a car (or more likely, truck/tanker/tank) with no occupant is a huge
competitive advantage, because _someone is actively trying to kill the
occupant_. Build something with even a 90% chance of crashing and you still
win, because you can take people off the battlefield entirely while your
opponent loses precious soldiers with every vehicle that's destroyed.

Then after the war, people's risk tolerances get reset because quibbling over
a 1/10,000 chance of death seems ridiculous when people have been actively
trying to kill you for the last 5 years and a countable percentage of your
friends are now dead.

The way global politics is going we probably don't even have to wait 10 years
for this.

~~~
zazen
You seem to have a war like WW2 in mind. But a war between big powers in the
21st century couldn't drag on for five years while you frantically work on new
technology. Even without use of nukes, one side or the other is going to be
flattened a lot faster than in the days when bombers used propellers.

Now, a new Cold War, that might push technological competition, although you
won't get that "reset" of people's attitudes that you're after.

~~~
reitzensteinm
It sounds more like he has a war like Iraq and Afghanistan in mind. Imagine
resupply convoys being driven autonomously, capable of launching drones for
defense.

[https://www.army-technology.com/features/feature77200/](https://www.army-
technology.com/features/feature77200/)

"[...] every 55,702 barrels of fuel burned in Afghanistan by the US military
forces corresponded to one casualty."

~~~
close04
> It sounds more like he has a war like Iraq and Afghanistan in mind. Imagine
> [...]

So... that would make them _exactly_ the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. If that
were the case we wouldn't have to imagine, we'd have the results in the field
already.

So that war must be of a different kind. Not the kind where you already have
technical superiority and have 0 incentive to develop it because you can
already make truckloads of money by supplying current generation equipment to
the front lines. It has to be a war where developing the new tech is the
difference between your country existing or not a decade or more from now.

That's a special kind of war. It could be a cold war but it's unlikely to have
one of those in the same way the one from the 20th century unfolded. And if
_that_ kind of "hot" war is the only one that can bring these improvements I'd
rather stick to driving my own car and labeling my own photo library :).

~~~
phyller
I think you are half right. It would take wars exactly like Irag and
Afghanistan. And here we are, testing autonomous vehicles. Perhaps I'm wrong,
but my understanding was the current raft of autonomous technology was
supported in it's early stages by DARPA, with their priorities set by what was
going on in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Someone I know frequently relays an anecdote. They were designing a new
military helicopter. One of the requirements was that if the pilot was injured
the aircraft should be able to return to base and come to a hover. They were
trying to figure out how to cut weight. My friend said, well, if we just
remove the pilot and all the equipment needed to support them, we'll lose a
lot of weight, and the vehicle will be more aerodynamic. His suggestion wasn't
taken seriously. That was before Iraq/Afghanistan.

That project got canceled, my friend retired. I have another friend working at
the same company. They are building an autonomous helicopter.

*Edit: ok looks like someone else already noticed this: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17600849](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17600849)

~~~
close04
What I mean is that it's not _these_ wars that will bring you autonomous
vehicles. It's war in general, the idea of using autonomous machines of any
kind for war is very old, and so is the study of it. But Iraq has been a war
zone for decades now (with intermezzos). And although some of the tech was
there since before the Gulf War we still haven't progressed that far in ~30
years. This kind of war brings slightly accelerated incremental progress,
evolution.

Something like a WW or a cold war where you question whether your city will be
the next Hiroshima brings you a jump: the nuclear bomb, the ICBM, man in space
and on the Moon, and so many other Sci-Fi tech. That's what I meant.

Yes, today we have slightly better autonomous vehicles than a decade ago but
this is natural evolution and it relied on progress in so many other (not
necessarily war driven) improvements: computers, electronics, etc.

I would rather not see the war that brings you _the_ AI for autonomous
machines.

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TheArcane
This is truly fascinating. As an engineer working with autonomous driving,
I've always been under the impression that sel-driving car research exploded
after the 2005 DARPA Grand challenge.

It's embarrassing that I never knew about PROMETHEUS given that it was a €749m
pan-European collaboration on autonomous driving.

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kakali
Does Navlab not predate this work? It started in 1984.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navlab](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navlab)

~~~
czr
The Navlab project and Dickmanns' projects (VaMoRs / Prometheus) were mostly
concurrent, but, yeah, I think CMU started & published initial work first.

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dekhn
Can somebody who understands what Dickmanns did, can you explain? Was he
actually doing object detection on road elements? How did it stay in the
lanes?

~~~
blattimwind
It didn't use GPS or any sort of pre-fabbed maps. It drove purely by eye /
machine vision using four cameras. No radar or lidar.

~~~
dekhn
I'm asking, specifically, what machine vision technology it used? In 1994
there wasn't much machine vision (that I'm aware of) that would even be able
to do lane-keeping, except under incredibly idealized conditions (empty roads,
no weather, good lighting). If so, I would request that whomever claimed this
guy invented the self driving car temper their claim.

~~~
jmiserez
Here is what someone on the project had to say about it:

> _Our vision system relied (heavily, not exclusively) on sensing prominent
> horizontal features symmetric about a common centerline. (Cars and trucks,
> especially at the time, have a lot of horizontal lines: bumpers, window top
> /bottom, valence, etc.)_

Thread here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10328687](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10328687)

~~~
dekhn
Ah! Yes, I also watched the video and I see they are identifying little "cups"
(one horizontal line and two vertical).

Bridges also have many hoizontal features symmetric about a common centerline.
I would expect many false positives driving near bridges.

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lorenzhs
Just an odd observation: in one of the photos, the UniBwM car has a Bundeswehr
license plate (Y-320624), yet there's no mention of any military involvement
in the article. I'm guessing here, but maybe that was just a trick to get
around some regulations that only apply to civilian vehicles?

~~~
macco
Diekmann was professor in a military university. It's mentioned in the
beginning.

~~~
lorenzhs
Ah yes, silly me. _" [...] in 1975, still under 40, he secured a position at a
new research university of Germany’s armed forces"_ \- must have missed that
earlier. Thanks.

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agumonkey
Was Thrun already involved with German Computer Vision ?

Sad that new AI is not doing the deeds on checking prior art..

