Armin B. Cremers is currently full professor and director at institute of informatics, University of Bonn. His research interests include information systems, software technology, and artificial intelligence. From 2009 to 2014, he held the vice president position of University of Bonn. Since 2010, he is holding an invited professorship in the school of Automation at HUST, Wuhan, China. Since 2014, he is directing his own BIT Emeritus Research Group with a special focus on AI Foundations. Armin B. Cremers studied mathematics and physics at the University of Karlsruhe, Germany. After his graduate diploma (1971) and PhD (1972), both in mathematics, he received his academic lectureship qualification for computer science (1974), all from the University of Karlsruhe. Following an invitation by Seymour Ginsburg, he joined the University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles, in 1973 where he worked until 1976 as an assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science. With Ginsburg he initiated Grammar Forms, a new formalism for grammatical families. Since 1990 A. B. Cremers has been professor and director of computer science and head of the research group in artificial intelligence at the University of Bonn. From Bonn he has contributed fundamentally to artificial intelligence and robotics (with Wolfram Burgard, Dieter Fox, Sebastian Thrun among his students), and to the development of software engineering, particularly in civil engineering, and information systems, particularly in the geosciences. Together with Matthias Jarke he established the Bonn-Aachen International Center for Information Technology (BIT) in 2001 and led this as Founding Scientific Director from the University of Bonn side until his retirement from teaching in 2014.

Abstract:

Aspects of the motivation, state of the art and outlook of autonomous driving are highlighted. Basic research contributions from the beginning of the 1990s have originated in the Bonn research group in probabilistic robotics. The history of driverless cars is briefly presented, along with recent research results of the Intelligent Vision Systems Group in Bonn.