The Eureka PROMETHEUS Project (PROgraMme for a European Traffic of Highest Efficiency and Unprecedented Safety, 1987–1995) was the largest R&D project ever in the field of driverless cars. It received €749 million 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 Basic Research 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' (BMM) on 18–20 October 1994 in Paris. Projects demonstrated ('Common European Demonstrators') 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 1000 km on a Paris multi-lane highway in standard heavy traffic at speeds up to 130 km/h. 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.

Participants

There were upwards of 600 commercial members that participated in some way in the Prometheus Project, however, notable ones include BMW In addition to commercial participation, there were multiple countries that assisted with the project. These include