An Engineer in the Field of Autonomous Cars

I misread the instructions. Please treat this as Blog 3 and vice versa.

Ernst Dickmanns is revered as the pioneer of the 3-dimensional vision and tracking technology in future autonomous cars.

He was born in 1936 to a life in World War II Germany. He studied aerospace/aeronautics at RWTH Aachen University from 1956-1961, and proceeded with study of control engineering at Princeton University in the United States from 1964-1965. He worked with The German Aerospace Research Establishment for 14 years from 1961-1975 where he began researching the fields of machine vision and vehicle guidance, which now form a backbone of most modern vehicular vision and tracking technology. After that, in 1975 he founded Institut fuer Flugmechanik und Systemdynamik (Institute of Flight Mechanics and System Dynamics) where he stayed until 2001 to research vision and tracking technology for autonomous cars.

His research began with the Mercedes-Benz, where the car would be able to be controlled by evaluating images and executing the correct actions on the gas pedal and steering wheel. The reseach was successful and resulted in an autonomous car that could drive itself as early as 1987. The autonomous car at this point couldn't drive on streets with other cars, but was a huge leap for the technology, and was way ahead of its time.

Eventually, as technology progressed revolutionary technologies moved from 3-dimensions to 4-dimensions to account for time and movement of perceived "objects" on the road. The next big leap taken by Dickmanns and his research team came in 1992 where the autonomous cars became able to function with traffic acting as dynamic obstacles, demonstrating that autonomous cars could truly handle real-time vision and calculation on the road.

The first test in Dickmanns' genius in real-world traffic was in 1995, where it was tested on a highway near Charles-de-Gaulle airport in Paris, where it drove over a thousand kilometers successfully, without incident.

In the second test, Dickmanns pushed the capabilities of the technology, testing the autonomous car at speeds of over 110 mph on the German autobahn. It, again, performed successfully with no accidents.

Since then the technology has revolutionized, becoming smarter and smarter. The technology has become able to drive on different types of roads in different types of areas with different types of vehicles. Autonomous vision technology is becoming more and more accurate in real world applications and as autonomous cars begin to takeover the roads, Ernst Dickmanns will be remembered as the father of autonomous cars.

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Dickmanns
http://www.springer.com/engineering/mechanical+engineering/book/978-1-84628-637-7