The Eureka PROMETHEUS Project was the largest R&D project ever in the field of driverless cars. It received in funding from the EUREKA member states, and defined the state of the art of autonomous vehicles. Numerous universities and car manufacturers participated in this Pan-European project. In formulating the project, the automotive and industrial partners recognised the need for a wide range of skills and cooperated with over forty research establishments to create a programme consisting of seven sub-projects. Under a steering committee were three projects on industrial research and four on basic research. Industrial research
PRO-CHIP: Custom hardware for intelligent processing in vehicles
PRO-COM : Methods and standards for communication
PRO-GEN : Traffic scenario for new assessment and introduction of new systems
In 1987, some UK Universities expressed concern that the industrial focus on the project neglected import traffic safety issues such as pedestrian protection. PRO-GEN project leader, the UK Government's Transport and Road Research Laboratory noted that research activities should 'in some way, further the aims of the vehicle companies.
Results
The project culminated in a 'Board Members Meeting' on 18–20 October 1994 in Paris. Projects demonstrated 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 PRO-ART 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 on a Paris multi-lane highway in standard heavy traffic at speeds up to. 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. The next culmination point was achieved in 1995, when Dickmanns´ re-engineered autonomous S-Class Mercedes-Benz took a trip from Munich in Bavaria to Copenhagen in Denmark and back, using saccadiccomputer vision and transputers to react in real time. The robot achieved speeds exceeding on the German Autobahn, with a mean time between human interventions of. In traffic it executed manoeuvres to pass other cars. Despite being a research system without emphasis on long distance reliability, it drove up to without any human intervention. Dickmann for his contributions to autonomous driving received the Eduard-Rhein-Foundation Technology Award 2017 for "For Pioneering Contributions to Autonomic Driving" http://www.eduard-rhein-stiftung.de/entscheidende-beitraege-zum-autonomen-fahren/ PROMETHEUS PRO-COM was driven by Daimler-Benz, https://www.bosch.de/ and two teams of http://www.rwth-aachen.de/go/id/a/?, namely teams of https://www.comsys.rwth-aachen.de/team/otto-spaniol/ and https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernhard_Walke. Main results were drive measurements at 5.9 GHz to characterize the vehicle-to-vehicle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-vehicle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_propagation. Further, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium_access_control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_protocol were developed and their https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_performance were evaluated by use of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System-level_simulation. The simulation technique applied, e.g., for Vehicle-to-Infrastructure communication https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-everything analysis is described in http://www.comnets.rwth-aachen.de/downloads/publications/RoWiPl_IMACS94_01.pdf. A concise description of the protocols developed in PRO-COM and their relative network performance is contained in http://www.comnets.rwth-aachen.de/downloads/publications/Plenge_1995_performance_of_medium.pdf. Among these is the http://www.comnets.rwth-aachen.de/downloads/publications/1991ZhuHeWadcap.pdf. This protocol is in large part a template for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4G https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LTE_Advanced protocol LTE-Vehicular, currently standardized as "side link " for V2V communication, see also .
