Ensuring Safe Physical AI in Urban Mobility via Hazard-Informed Synthesized Envelopes

This report presents a structured Robotics Physical Safety Framework based on explicit asset declaration, systematic vulnerability enumeration, and hazard-driven synthetic data generation. The approach bridges classical risk engineering with modern machine learning pipelines, enabling safety envelope learning grounded in a formalized hazard ontology. The key contribution of this framework is the alignment between classical safety engineering, digital twin simulation, synthetic data generation, and machine learning model training.

Rapid progress in AI agents has brought growing attention to agent safety, with extensive evaluation focused on digital environments. As agents move into the physical world, embodied safety becomes increasingly important: failures can cause human injury and costly hardware damage. Beyond selecting safe actions, embodied agents must also operate under real-time constraints: the physical world does not pause while an agent reasons. As pedestrians move and vehicles approach during inference, an action that appears safe at observation time may become unsafe before execution. Real-time embodied safety therefore depends on both decision quality and decision latency. We introduce RT-SAFE, a simulated urban benchmark for evaluating embodied-agent safety under real-time constraints. RT-SAFE combines navigation tasks with moving actors, environmental hazards, and traffic rules, while allowing the world to evolve throughout inference and action execution. Across eight VLMs, agents achieve high task completion yet almost never complete safely: in the hardest setting, only 0.7% of episodes finish without a safety event. More strikingly, matched static and real-time evaluations yield task completion rates of 91.3% and 94.1%, respectively, while real-time execution increases collisions by $12.3\times$. These results reveal that standard task success can mask substantial safety failures, and that decision latency itself can become a source of physical risk. Finally, we show that RT-SAFE can support offline RL training and substantially reduce collision rates while achieving strong task completion.

In this work, we propose an agentic gamification framework for hazard-informed learning of robot safety policies through synthetic scenarios. We model scenario generation as an adversarial game between two agents: a Red Team that explores the space of potential failures by constructing hazardous situations, and a Blue Team that incrementally refines safety policies to prevent them. This iterative process enables efficient discovery of high-risk edge cases that are unlikely to be captured through random simulation or manual enumeration. By combining classical risk modeling with adversarial scenario generation and modern learning paradigms, this work provides a scalable pathway for embedding safety into Physical AI systems operating in complex real-world environments. The paper describes ongoing work. The contribution is a problem formulation and a proposed solution architecture.