VaMP drives from Munich to Copenhagen and back autonomously

Background

VaMP was built by Ernst Dickmanns' team at the University of the Bundeswehr Munich together with Mercedes-Benz ^[1]. The car took part in the PROMETHEUS programme, and Fabian Kröger's 2024 history of European vehicle automation research gives that programme a section of its own, including the measured performance of the VITA-II and VaMP research vehicles ^[2].

The step before

In October 1994, at the final presentation of PROMETHEUS, VaMP and VITA-2 drove more than 1,000 km in normal traffic at up to 130 km/h ^[1]. That was the demonstration that the two cars could hold their place in ordinary traffic over a long distance. The drive of 1995 went further and faster.

The 1995 drive

In 1995 the VaMP drove more than 2,000 km from Munich to Copenhagen and back in traffic, reaching up to 180 km/h ^[1]. On the German Autobahn during that run it exceeded 175 km/h ^[1]. The distance is the point as much as the speed: the car was not circling a test track but travelling between cities along public roads, with other traffic around it ^[1].

The car and its computation

The vehicle was a Mercedes 500 SEL that had been re-engineered to command steering, throttle and brakes from real-time image sequences ^[1]. "Real-time" matters here: the pictures arrive continuously, and the car has to turn them into a steering angle, a throttle setting or a brake command fast enough for the next moment, not after the fact. It used vision only, with no GPS ^[1], so the car had to read the lane, its own position on the road and the traffic ahead from camera images alone, without satellite positioning.

Sixty transputers handled the computation ^[1]. A transputer is a microprocessor built to be wired together with others into a parallel machine, so the image work could be spread over many chips at once instead of run one step after another. The input came from four cameras at two focal lengths ^[1]: two focal lengths means the system saw the road both wide and far, a wide view for the near lane and the surroundings, a narrow one for what was coming up ahead. The system also had attention control using artificial saccades ^[1]. A human eye does not take in a whole scene at once; it jumps from point to point, and each jump is a saccade. VaMP moved its attention between regions of the image in a similar way, spending its computing effort where the current situation needed it.

How often a human had to take over

The mean distance between human interventions during the trip was 9 km, and the car covered up to 158 km without any intervention ^[1]. So there were long stretches in which the software did the driving by itself. The safety driver took over in a few critical situations, among them construction areas that the system had no model for ^[1]. The examples given are of scenes the software had not been built to represent, which is where a machine that reads the road from images is most likely to be lost.

Where it stands in the record

Kröger's 2024 history records long-distance drives by VaMP and by the Italian ARGO vehicle in 1995 and 1998 ^[2], which puts the Munich–Copenhagen trip into a line of European long-distance experiments rather than leaving it as an isolated stunt. The car itself was kept: it went on display at the Deutsches Museum in Munich in May 2006 ^[1].