Ernst Dickmanns
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Ernst Dieter Dickmanns is a
German German(s) may refer to: * Germany, the country of the Germans and German things **Germania (Roman era) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizenship in Germany, see also Ge ...
pioneer of dynamic computer vision and of driverless cars. Dickmanns has been a professor at
Bundeswehr University Munich image:Eingangsbereich der Universität der Bundeswehr München.jpg, Entrance to the university University of the Bundeswehr Munich (, UniBw München) is one of two research universities in Germany at federal level that both were founded in 1973 a ...
(1975–2001), and visiting professor to Caltech and to MIT, teaching courses on "dynamic vision".


Biography

Dickmanns was born in 1936. He studied
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and
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at
RWTH Aachen RWTH Aachen University (), in German ''Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen'', is a German public research university located in Aachen, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. With more than 47,000 students enrolled in 144 study prog ...
(1956–1961), and control engineering at
Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private Ivy League research university in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial ...
(1964/65); from 1961 to 1975 he was associated with the German Aero-Space Research Establishment (now DLR) Oberpfaffenhofen, working in the fields of flight dynamics and
trajectory optimization Trajectory optimization is the process of designing a trajectory that minimizes (or maximizes) some measure of performance while satisfying a set of constraints. Generally speaking, trajectory optimization is a technique for computing an open-loop ...
. In 1971/72 he spent a Post-Doc Research Associateship with the
NASA The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agencies of the United States government, independent agency of the federal government of the United States, US federal government responsible for the United States ...
-
Marshall Space Flight Center Marshall Space Flight Center (officially the George C. Marshall Space Flight Center; MSFC), located in Redstone Arsenal, Alabama (Huntsville, Alabama, Huntsville postal address), is the Federal government of the United States, U.S. government's ...
, Huntsville (orbiter re-entry). From 1975 to 2001 he was with UniBw Munich, where he initiated the 'Institut fuer Flugmechanik und Systemdynamik' (IFS), the Institut fuer die 'Technik Autonomer Systeme' (TAS), and the research activities in machine vision for vehicle guidance.


Pioneering work in autonomous driving

In the early 1980s his team equipped a
Mercedes-Benz Mercedes-Benz (), commonly referred to simply as Mercedes and occasionally as Benz, is a German automotive brand that was founded in 1926. Mercedes-Benz AG (a subsidiary of the Mercedes-Benz Group, established in 2019) is based in Stuttgart, ...
van with cameras and other sensors. The 5-ton van was re-engineered that it was possible to control
steering wheel A steering wheel (also called a driving wheel, a hand wheel, or simply wheel) is a type of steering control in vehicles. Steering wheels are used in most modern land vehicles, including all mass-production automobiles, buses, light and hea ...
,
throttle A throttle is a mechanism by which fluid flow is managed by construction or obstruction. An engine's power can be increased or decreased by the restriction of inlet gases (by the use of a throttle), but usually decreased. The term ''throttle'' ha ...
, and brakes through
computer A computer is a machine that can be Computer programming, programmed to automatically Execution (computing), carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations (''computation''). Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic set ...
commands based on real-time evaluation of image sequences.
Software Software consists of computer programs that instruct the Execution (computing), execution of a computer. Software also includes design documents and specifications. The history of software is closely tied to the development of digital comput ...
was written that translated the sensory data into appropriate driving commands. For safety reasons, initial experiments in
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took place on streets without
traffic Traffic is the movement of vehicles and pedestrians along land routes. Traffic laws govern and regulate traffic, while rules of the road include traffic laws and informal rules that may have developed over time to facilitate the orderly an ...
. In 1986 the Robot Car "VaMoRs" managed to drive all by itself and by 1987 was capable of driving itself at speeds up to . One of the greatest challenges in high-speed autonomous driving arises through the rapidly changing visual street scenes. Back then, computers were much slower than they are today (~1% of 1%); therefore, sophisticated
computer vision Computer vision tasks include methods for image sensor, acquiring, Image processing, processing, Image analysis, analyzing, and understanding digital images, and extraction of high-dimensional data from the real world in order to produce numerical ...
strategies were necessary to react in real time. The team of Dickmanns solved the problem through an innovative approach to dynamic
vision Vision, Visions, or The Vision may refer to: Perception Optical perception * Visual perception, the sense of sight * Visual system, the physical mechanism of eyesight * Computer vision, a field dealing with how computers can be made to gain und ...
. Spatiotemporal models were used right from the beginning, dubbed '4-D approach', which did not need storing previous images but nonetheless was able to yield estimates of all 3-D position and velocity components. 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.
Kalman filter In statistics and control theory, Kalman filtering (also known as linear quadratic estimation) is an algorithm that uses a series of measurements observed over time, including statistical noise and other inaccuracies, to produce estimates of unk ...
s have been extended to perspective imaging and were used to achieve robust autonomous driving even in presence of
noise Noise is sound, chiefly unwanted, unintentional, or harmful sound considered unpleasant, loud, or disruptive to mental or hearing faculties. From a physics standpoint, there is no distinction between noise and desired sound, as both are vibrat ...
and
uncertainty Uncertainty or incertitude refers to situations involving imperfect or unknown information. It applies to predictions of future events, to physical measurements that are already made, or to the unknown, and is particularly relevant for decision ...
. Feedback of prediction errors allowed bypassing the (ill-conditioned) inversion of perspective projection by least-squares parameter fits. When in 1986/87 the EUREKA-project 'PROgraMme for a European Traffic of Highest Efficiency and Unprecedented Safety' (
PROMETHEUS In Greek mythology, Prometheus (; , , possibly meaning "forethought")Smith"Prometheus". is a Titans, Titan. He is best known for defying the Olympian gods by taking theft of fire, fire from them and giving it to humanity in the form of technol ...
) was initiated by the European car manufacturing industry (funding in the range of several hundred million Euros), the initially planned autonomous lateral guidance by buried cables was dropped and substituted by the much more flexible machine vision approach proposed by Dickmanns, and partially encouraged by his successes. Most of the major car companies participated; so did Dickmanns and his team in cooperation with the Daimler-Benz AG. Substantial progress was made in the following 7 years. In particular, Dickmanns' robot cars learned to drive in traffic under various conditions. An accompanying human driver with a "red button" made sure the robot vehicle could not get out of control and become a danger to the public. Since 1992, driving in public traffic was standard as final step in real-world testing. Several dozen
Transputer The transputer is a series of pioneering microprocessors from the 1980s, intended for parallel computing. To support this, each transputer had its own integrated memory and serial communication links to exchange data with other transputers. ...
s, a special breed of parallel computers, were used to deal with the (by 1990s standards) enormous computational demands. Two culmination points were achieved in 1994/95, when Dickmanns´ re-engineered autonomous S-Class
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performed international demonstrations. The first was the final presentation of the PROMETHEUS project in October 1994 on Autoroute 1 near the airport Charles-de-Gaulle in Paris. With guests on board, the twin vehicles of Daimler-Benz (VITA-2) and UniBwM ( VaMP) drove more than on the three-lane highway in standard heavy traffic at speeds up to . Driving in free lanes, convoy driving with distance keeping depending on speed, and lane changes left and right with autonomous passing have been demonstrated; the latter required interpreting the road scene also in the rear hemisphere. Two cameras with different focal lengths for each hemisphere have been used in parallel for this purpose. The second culmination point was a trip in the fall of 1995 from
Munich Munich is the capital and most populous city of Bavaria, Germany. As of 30 November 2024, its population was 1,604,384, making it the third-largest city in Germany after Berlin and Hamburg. Munich is the largest city in Germany that is no ...
in
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to
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in
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to a project meeting and back. Both longitudinal and lateral guidance were performed autonomously by vision. On highways, the robot achieved speeds exceeding (there is no general speed limit on the
Autobahn The (; German , ) is the federal controlled-access highway system in Germany. The official term is (abbreviated ''BAB''), which translates as 'federal motorway'. The literal meaning of the word is 'Federal Auto(mobile) Track'. Much of t ...
). Publications from Dickmann's research group indicate a mean autonomously driven distance without resets of ~; the longest autonomously driven stretch reached . More than half of the resets required were achieved autonomously (no human intervention). This is particularly impressive considering that the system used black-and-white video-cameras and did not model situations like road construction sites with yellow lane markings; lane-changes at over , and other traffic with more than relative speed have been handled. In total, 95% autonomous driving (by distance) was achieved. In the years 1994 to 2004 the elder 5-ton van 'VaMoRs' was used to develop the capabilities needed for driving on networks of minor (also unsealed) roads and for cross-country driving including avoidance of negative obstacles like ditches. Turning off onto crossroads of unknown width and intersection angles required a big effort, but has been achieved with "Expectation-based, Multi-focal, Saccadic vision" (EMS-vision). This vertebrate-type vision uses animation capabilities based on knowledge about subject classes (including the autonomous vehicle itself) and their potential behaviour in certain situations. This rich background is used for control of gaze and attention as well as for locomotion.Dynamic Vision for Perception and Control of Motion
a 2007 book by Ernst D. Dickmanns Beside ground vehicle guidance, also applications of the 4-D approach to dynamic vision for unmanned air vehicles (conventional aircraft and helicopters) have been investigated. Autonomous visual landing approaches and landings have been demonstrated in hardware-in-the-loop simulations with visual/inertial data fusion. Real-world autonomous visual landing approaches till shortly before touchdown have been performed in 1992 with the twin-propeller aircraft Dornier 128 of the University of Brunswick at the airport there. Another success of this machine vision technology was the first ever visually controlled grasping experiment of a free-floating object in weightlessness on board the Space Shuttle Columbia D2-mission in 1993 as part of the 'Rotex'-experiment of DLR.


See also

* Driverless car


References


External links


Numerous research papers of Ernst Dickmanns (Google Scholar)

Dynamic Vision by Ernst D. Dickmanns
{{DEFAULTSORT:Dickmanns, Ernst 1936 births Living people People from Rhein-Sieg-Kreis People from the Rhine Province German artificial intelligence researchers German computer scientists Machine learning researchers German roboticists Academic staff of Bundeswehr University Munich