Meet the early pioneers who shaped the future of today's self-driving cars

SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- The race to develop driverless cars long predates Silicon Valley and the high-profile tech companies that dominate the industry today.

Decades before autonomous vehicles competed in high-speed desert challenges, a small group of engineers in Germany and the United States were quietly building the foundations of self-driving technology.

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Many credit figures, such as Karl Benz, Henry Ford, and Enzo Ferrari, have shaped the modern automobile.

But when it comes to self-driving vehicles, a different set of names emerges, including Ernst Dickmanns, Red Whittaker, Sebastian Thrun, Chris Urmson and Anthony Levandowski.

Several of these innovators first gained widespread attention during the DARPA Grand Challenges, a series of autonomous-vehicle races launched by the U.S. Department of Defense in 2004 to accelerate progress in self-driving technology.

Years before those competitions, however, Dickmanns and his team were already testing autonomous vehicles on public roads.

"I'm Ernst Dickmanns, and I was the first who put a self-driving car on the road in the early 1980s," he said.

Now nearly 90, Dickmanns lives in a small town near Munich, far from the technology centers of the United States. He rarely speaks publicly about his work, but his contributions helped shape how autonomous vehicles "see" the world.

Dickmanns pioneered dynamic computer vision, the technology that allows machines to interpret moving images in real time.

In the 1960s and 1970s, he worked with the German Aerospace Research Establishment, analyzing rocket trajectories, applying image-processing techniques at a time when computer power was severely limited.

"Well, in Oberpfaffenhofen, I've been the acting director of the Centre in 1974/75," Dickmanns said, describing his early exposure to image evaluation from satellites and aircraft. As microprocessor performance rapidly improved, he concluded that real-time image analysis for vehicles would become possible within his lifetime.

By the mid-1980s, Dickmanns and a small engineering team south of Munich converted a Mercedes-Benz van into a self-driving vehicle. Using early Intel processors and multiple cameras, the van could evaluate images 10 to 12 times per second.

"And we were the first to really run these vehicle controls in real time in 1986," Dickmanns said. His team later demonstrated autonomous driving at highway speeds of up to 96 kilometers per hour on a stretch of the autobahn, far faster than comparable projects at the time.

Across the Atlantic, progress was slower initially.

Interest in autonomous systems surged again after the 1979 nuclear accident at Three Mile Island, where hazardous conditions made human cleanup dangerous. In 1983, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University developed semiautonomous robots to analyze radioactive contamination.

"The development of field robots is motivated by the need to remove humans from hazards and to increase productivity, effectiveness and quality," said a researcher in a 1987 archival recording.

That work was led by roboticist William "Red" Whittaker, another key figure in autonomous vehicle history.

Whittaker and his team at Carnegie Mellon University developed the Terregator, an early pioneering autonomous vehicle capable of navigating sidewalks using a single camera and laser sensors, though at very slow speeds.

This was part of CMU's early NavLab project, which included key researchers Takeo Kanade, Charles Thorpe and Dean Pomerleau who worked on the first NavLab vehicle, a modified Chevy van that eventually produced 11 generations of autonomous vehicles.

However, the first iterations of the NavLabs moved at slow speeds using computer vision. While early 1980s prototypes existed, German researcher Ernst Dickmanns is often credited with high-speed autonomous driving in 1986.

"The Terregator was a little bit like a big desk with six wheels," Whittaker said.

By 1986, Carnegie Mellon engineers introduced the first self-contained NavLab1, a Chevy van equipped with generators, sensors and computers that allowed researchers to ride inside as it drove itself. The first version topped out at about 20 miles per hour, but later versions reached highway speeds.

"It was the first one to really look like a car," Whittaker said.

In 1995, a NavLab vehicle drove nearly the entire distance from Pittsburgh to Washington, D.C., under autonomous control, using cameras, cruise control and a laptop computer.

Dickmanns continued to advance his approach, which differed sharply from most U.S. systems. While many American teams relied heavily on lidar, radar and GPS - what he calls "confirmation vision" - Dickmanns developed "pathfinder vision," which relies primarily on analyzing the visible road ahead.

"Our system does the entire recognition of the environment, both where the roads are and how far you are off the roads," he said, noting that his vehicles operated without GPS data that U.S. teams relied on during early DARPA races.

He compared his system to human vision, explaining how motion compensation and predictive models can stabilize images even when cameras move.

"We did everything just by vision, so we had a complete vision. Systems like humans do," Dickmanns said.

Despite Germany's early lead, large-scale commercial development shifted to the United States, where venture capital and government funding were more abundant.

The DARPA Grand Challenges brought together many of the scientists who would later define the industry.

Sebastian Thrun, who led Stanford University's team to victory in the 2005 DARPA race, later co-founded Google's self-driving car project, which became Waymo. Anthony Levandowski and Chris Urmson were also prominent competitors before joining Google.

"I think it's fair to say Ernst Dickmanns is the godfather of the self-driving car, but there might be multiple godparents," Thrun said, describing Dickmanns as the leading figure in the field during the 1990s.

Levandowski agreed that there is no single pioneer.

"There's no pioneers. Look, it's a continual effort," he said. "It's like, it's a team sport."

Urmson, credited with helping transform Google's autonomous car research into a commercial operation, also points back to the German engineer.

"I would look to someone like Ernst Dickmanns," Urmson said. "Who was well ahead of the time in the work he was doing in Germany."

As autonomous vehicles continue to expand in cities such as San Francisco, the technology's roots trace back decades - to underfunded labs, early experiments and researchers who pursued the vision of a car that could drive itself long before the idea captured the world's attention.