Robot, Take the Wheel. Jason Torchinsky

      These ten CPUs would only process certain tiny 32 by 32 pixel areas determined to be interesting in some way. The result was that the important parts of the camera’s feed (high contrast areas, areas in motion) could be processed much quicker, with only twenty microseconds needed to extract the important and required information from the visual feed.20

      Dickmanns called his machine vision solution “Dynamic Vision,” and considered it a “4-D” approach to machine vision, incorporating both strict processing of the video feed and time delays, as well as predictive behavior information for certain classes of identified objects, things like “spatiotemporal models for motion processes of objects,” and more.21

      Dickmanns’s first autonomous van, called the VaMoRs, first drove autonomously on non-public sections of Germany’s Autobahn in 1986. By 1987 the vans were on public roads driving at nearly 60 mph; collision avoidance and obstacle detection were implemented, allowing the van to follow a car in a convoy if desired.