[sokoloff]

In 1991, I worked for Daimler (Mercedes) in their Advanced Vehicle Research group. We had an abandoned section of Autobahn a few miles outside Stuttgart available for our use, but we also had authorization to test on public highways in autonomous mode. We just had to have a driver seated and paying attention, and had a red panic button on the center console. Pushing the panic button reverted the vehicle control to fully manual. (This was in a large bus-like vehicle, based on the Vario platform, a little larger than a current Sprinter.)

http://www.autoevolution.com/news/a-short-history-of-mercede... is an image of the actual vehicle I worked on.

So, while we couldn't test in no-humans onboard mode, we logged hundred of miles in fully autonomous mode.

Technical notes: the programming language was Occam. I'd have to look through my notes to see what the network size was, but the vision system alone (my main focus, no pun intended) was in the low double figures of processors, with most of those being dedicated to variance calculations to find prominent horizontal edges. I seem to recall we processed the video stream at 15 frames per second by the time I left.

Best. Internship. Ever...