He studied aerospace and aeronautics at RWTH Aachen (1956–1961), and control engineering at Princeton University (1964/65); from 1961 to 1975 he was associated with the German Aero-Space Research Establishment (now DLR) Oberpfaffenhofen, working in the fields of flight dynamics and trajectory optimization.
The 5-ton van was re-engineered that it was possible to control steering wheel, throttle, and brakes through computer commands based on real-time evaluation of image sequences.
Spatiotemporal models were used right from the beginning, dubbed '4-D approach', which did not need storing previous images but nonetheless was able to yield estimates of all 3-D position and velocity components.
When in 1986/87 the EUREKA-project 'PROgraMme for a European Traffic of Highest Efficiency and Unprecedented Safety' (PROMETHEUS) was initiated by the European car manufacturing industry (funding in the range of several hundred million Euros), the initially planned autonomous lateral guidance by buried cables was dropped and substituted by the much more flexible machine vision approach proposed by Dickmanns, and partially encouraged by his successes.
The second culmination point was a 1,758 kilometres (1,092 mi) trip in the fall of 1995 from Munich in Bavaria to Odense in Denmark to a project meeting and back.
Turning off onto crossroads of unknown width and intersection angles required a big effort, but has been achieved with "Expectation-based, Multi-focal, Saccadic vision" (EMS-vision).
This vertebrate-type vision uses animation capabilities based on knowledge about subject classes (including the autonomous vehicle itself) and their potential behaviour in certain situations.
Real-world autonomous visual landing approaches till shortly before touchdown have been performed in 1992 with the twin-propeller aircraft Dornier 128 of the University of Brunswick at the airport there.
Another success of this machine vision technology was the first ever visually controlled grasping experiment of a free-floating object in weightlessness on board the Space Shuttle Columbia D2-mission in 1993 as part of the 'Rotex'-experiment of DLR.