Stable timed elastic bands with loose ends

In this paper we propose a trajectory planning approach for autonomous vehicles in highly dynamic traffic scenarios, capable of exploiting the observed trajectories of other vehicles. For this purpose, we introduce a novel variant of the timed elastic bands (TEB) approach by using fixed time intervals and a flexible goal position. We tested our method with a simulated merge-into-traffic scenario and compare it to a reference TEB implementation with focus on the impact of important parameters and the stability of planned trajectories. The results show that our method is an improvement over TEB in terms trajectory smoothness and stability.