Eureka Prometheus Project
The Eureka PROMETHEUS Project (PROgraMme for a European Traffic of Highest Efficiency and Unprecedented Safety, 1987-1995) was the largest R&D project ever in the field of driverless cars. It received €749 million in funding from the EUREKA member states,[1] and defined the state of the art of autonomous vehicles. Numerous universities and car manufacturers participated in this Pan-European project.
The project culminated in a 'Board Members Meeting' (BMM) on 18–20 October 1994 in Paris.[2] Projects demonstrated ('Common European Demonstrators') were:
CED 1 : Vision Enhancement
CED 2-1 : Friction Monitoring and Vehicle Dynamics
CED 2-2 : Lane Keeping Support
CED 2-3 : Visibility Range Monitoring
CED 2-4 : Driver Status Monitoring
CED 3 : Collision Avoidance
CED 4 : Cooperative Driving
CED 5 : Autonomous Intelligent Cruise Control
CED 6 : Automatic Emergency Call
CED 7 : Fleet Management
CED 9 : Dual Mode Route Guidance
CED 10: Travel and Traffic Information Systems
PROMETHEUS profited from the participation of Ernst Dickmanns, the 1980s pioneer of driverless cars, and his team at Bundeswehr Universität München, collaborating with Daimler-Benz. A first culmination point was achieved in 1994, when their twin robot vehicles VaMP and VITA-2 drove more than one thousand kilometers on a Paris multi-lane highway in standard heavy traffic at speeds up to 130 km/h. They demonstrated autonomous driving in free lanes, convoy driving, automatic tracking of other vehicles, and lane changes left and right with autonomous passing of other cars.[citation needed]
The next culmination point was achieved in 1995, when Dickmanns´ re-engineered autonomous S-Class Mercedes-Benz took a 1000-mile trip from Munich in Bavaria to Copenhagen in Denmark and back, using saccadic computer vision and transputers to react in real time. The robot achieved speeds exceeding 175 km/h on the German Autobahn, with a mean time between human interventions of 9 km. In traffic it executed manoeuvres to pass other cars. Despite being a research system without emphasis on long distance reliability, it drove up to 158 km without any human intervention.[3]
Participants
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- Ernst Dickmanns and team of Bundeswehr University of Munich
- Daimler-Benz
- Jaguar Cars
- PSA
- BMW
- Numerous others (to be completed)
See also
- Driverless car
- DARPA Grand Challenge
- ARGO Project on autonomous cars
- ELROB trials
- Grand Cooperative Driving Challenge 2011, International Competition
