Navigation & SLAM

TEB Planner (Timed Elastic Band)

The TEB (Timed Elastic Band) planner is a local trajectory planner for mobile robots that deforms an initial path into a time-parameterized trajectory by optimizing waypoint poses and time intervals jointly, subject to obstacle clearance, velocity and acceleration limits, and kinodynamic constraints such as car-like steering. Introduced by Rösmann et al. and implemented as a ROS local planner, it optimizes several topologically distinct candidate trajectories in parallel to avoid poor local minima.

Why it matters for physical AI

Reactive local planners like TEB remain the workhorse layer that turns global routes into safe, dynamically feasible motion for warehouse and service robots, sitting beneath whatever learned or foundation-model navigation stack issues the high-level goals.