Vehicle detection and tracking for the Urban Challenge

The Urban Challenge 2007 was a race of autonomous vehicles through an urban environment organized by the U.S. government. During the competition the vehicles encountered various typical scenarios of urban driving. Here they had to interact with other traffic which was human or machine driven. This paper describes the perception approach taken by Team Tartan Racing, winner of the competition. A focus is set on the detection and tracking of other vehicles around the robot. The presented approach allows a situation specific interpretation of perception data through situation assessment algorithms keeping the perception algorithms situation independent.