Robot Safety

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40 papers in the last four weeks, up 400% on the four weeks before. 0.4% of all new papers.

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Latest papers 161

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Turning Safety into Competence: Minimally Exploitable Robot Policies via Safety-Filtered Reinforcement Learning
Sep 23, 2026Ruihan Wu, Rui Yang, Donggeon David Oh +2Sequential MARL RL for Robotics
Department of Computer Science, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA
Benchmarking Robots for Everyday Environments: From Lab Experiments to Real-World Operations
Sep 22, 2026Raphael Memmesheimer, Martina Overbeck, Dominik Beyer +19Robotics Robot Safety
Autonomous Intelligent Systems, University of Bonn, Germany · FZI Forschungszentrum Informatik, Germany · School of Business and Economics, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany +8
SafeLoop: Risk-Aware Rollback for Vision-Language-Action Manipulation
Sep 22, 2026Zeyu Lou, Tianran Zhang, Xinquan Yue +2Long-Horizon Robotic Manipulation Robot Safety
Nanjing University, Nanjing, China · The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), Guangdong, China · Beijing University of Technology, Beijing, China
Coding Agents with an Obstacle-Aware Harness for Safe Robot Manipulation
Sep 17, 2026Bingxin Xu, Yuzhang Shang, Zhen Dong +1Robot Safety Robotic Manipulation
USC · UCF · UCSB
Runtime Safety Filtering for Two-Terminal Hazards in Robotic Battery Recycling
Sep 17, 2026Yuxin Cao, Wei Song, Xianglin Yang +4Robot Safety Safety Filtering
National University of Singapore, Singapore · Griffith University, Australia · UNSW Canberra, Australia +2
CoreSense: Traceable Failure Recall and Conflict-Aware Belief Gating for Auditable Robot Decisions
Sep 17, 2026Zoe LiRobot Failure Detection Robot Safety
Independent Researcher, Seattle, WA, USA
Winning a Won Game: Strict Reach-Avoid-Stay Control Barrier Functions for High-Dimensional Black-Box Systems
Sep 16, 2026Donggeon David Oh, Duy P. Nguyen, Gongkai Yuan +3Robotic Control Control Barrier Functions
Department of Computer Science, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA
CaSCo: Cascade-Aware Soft-Collision Motion Planning
Sep 16, 2026Shivaram Kumar, Gaoyuan Liu, Yoonchang SungRoadmap-Based Motion Planning Robot Safety
Nanyang Technological University
Timely Activation of Safety Filters via One-Step Reachability Expansion
Sep 15, 2026Javier BorquezReachability Analysis Safety-Critical Control
Universidad de Santiago de Chile Santiago, Chile
Escape-Aware Control Barrier Functions for Quadrotor Safety under Body-Rate Limits
Sep 15, 2026Lei Shi, Haosong Wen, Qichao LiuSafety-Critical Control Control Barrier Functions
University of Wisconsin–Madison · Southeast University · The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Collision-Aware Humanoid Whole-Body Control under Imperfect Tracking Targets
Sep 14, 2026Mohitvishnu S. Gadde, Ashish Malik, Pranay Dugar +3Robot Trajectory Tracking Humanoid Robot Control
Collaborative Robotics and Intelligent Systems Institute (CoRIS), Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR 97331
ResSafe: Learning Safety Filtering with Residual Reinforcement Learning for Humanoids
Sep 14, 2026Gechen Qu, Tong Zhang, Bike Zhang +4Safety-Critical Control Humanoid Robot Control
University of California, Berkeley · University of California, Los Angeles
ARC: Autonomous Robotics Compliance A Three-Layer Governance Architecture for Deployed Autonomous Systems
Sep 14, 2026Tord Eide, Einar HoltRobotics Robot Safety
Wybe Labs Inc. · Moss, Norway / USA
Exact Feasibility Certification and Optimal Responsibility Allocation for Multi-Robot CBF Safety Filters
Sep 14, 2026Chandan Kumar Sah, Jishnu KeshavanSafety-Critical Control Control Barrier Functions
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru 560012, India
ReactHuman: A Physics-Grounded Benchmark for Human-Like Reactive Decision-Making in Embodied Multimodal LLMs
Sep 12, 2026Yizhan Li, Jianxin You, Mengyang Xiong +5Physical Reasoning Robotics Simulation
Université de Montréal · Mila – Quebec AI Institute · McGill University +2
VertexCBF: Improving Neural Control Barrier Functions via Vertex-Restricted Control Search
Sep 11, 2026Bojan Derajić, Sebastian Bernhard, Wolfgang HönigControl Barrier Functions Safe Robot Navigation
Technical University of Berlin, Germany · AUMOVIO, Germany · Technical University of Applied Sciences Augsburg, Germany +1
ActSafeGuard: Differentiable and Training-Aligned Constraint Enforcement for Flow-Matching Policies
Sep 10, 2026Jianming Ma, Rongjun Jin, Xiaxi Si +3Robotic Control Robot Foundation Models
1Shanghai Jiao Tong University · 2Shanghai Innovation Institute
CT-SAFR: Safe and Interpretable Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Autonomous Robots: A Multi-Layered Verification Framework for Trustworthy AI-Driven Robotic Decision Making
Sep 9, 2026Cagri TemelCoT Faithfulness Large Language Model-Based Robot Planning
Hezarfen LLC Seattle, WA, USA · Grand Canyon University Phoenix, AZ, USA
Online, Reachability-Aware, Sampling-Based Motion Planning
Sep 8, 2026Brendan Gould, Zhiyuan Zhang, Panagiotis Tsiotras +1Robotic Control Reachability Analysis
Safe Task Planning with Long-Term Graph Memory for Embodied Agents
Sep 8, 2026Siyuan Li, Taiyan Lang, Aoqi Yan +6Large Language Model-Based Robot Planning Robot Safety
Faculty of Computing Harbin Institute of Technology · Engineering Systems and Design Singapore University of Technology and Design · Intelligent Science and Technology Academy of CASIC
Decentralized Safe Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning via Predictive Shielding
Sep 7, 2026Yacine El Yamani, Hanna Krasowski, Elena VanneauxMulti-Robot Coordination Robot Safety
ENSTA, IP Paris, Palaiseau, France · UC Berkeley, USA
CALM: Configuration-Aware Human Intervention Boundaries During Robot Approach
Sep 7, 2026Xinting Gao, Sipu Zhu, Weimin ZhuangRobot Safety Safe Motion Planning
School of Architecture, Tsinghua University, China · Architectural Design & Research Institute of Tsinghua University, China
How Long Until Your Robot Ignores You? A Safety Benchmark for LLM Orchestrators in Human-Humanoid Collaboration
Sep 7, 2026Aulon Bajrami, Mohamed Elshamouty, Werner KrausRobot Safety Human-Robot Collaboration
Fraunhofer IPA Stuttgart, Germany
A Physics-Consistent Benchmark for Contact-Rich Human-Robot Interaction in Assistive Care
Sep 2, 2026Chengxiao He, Shanghai Yuan, Liuqun Fan +1Human-Robot Interaction Assistive Robotics
School of Mechanical and Robotics Engineering, Tongji University, Shanghai, China · Centre for Advanced Robotics Technology Innovation, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore · College of Electronic and Information Engineering, Tongji University, Shanghai, China
Humanoid Safe Stop via Learned Stoppability Value
Sep 2, 2026Junfeng Long, Pieter Abbeel, Koushil Sreenath +3Robot Safety Humanoid Robotics
UC Berkeley · Carnegie Mellon University · Stanford University
LARC: Lazy Adaptive Reachability Certification of Robot Manipulator Trajectories
Aug 30, 2026Yu Feng, Hao Wu, Yuzhe Wang +1Reachability Analysis Robot Safety
Department of Mechanical Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore · Singapore Institute of Manufacturing Technology, Agency for Science Technology and Research, Singapore
Can Vision-Language Models Assess Proxemic Risk from Egocentric Robot Images?
Aug 12, 2026Vladyslava Rudas, Dmytro KuzmenkoVLM Evaluation Robot Safety
Department of Computer Science, National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Kyiv, Ukraine · Department of Multimedia Systems, National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Kyiv, Ukraine · Department of Computer Science, University of Turin, Turin, Italy
Herding End-to-End Autonomous Driving via Neuro-Symbolic Safety Guards
Aug 11, 2026Simón Patiño Idarraga, Erick Silva, Rehana Yasmin +1End-to-End Autonomous Driving Autonomous Driving Safety Evaluation
Universidad de Antioquia, Medellín, Colombia · King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Thuwal, Saudi Arabia
Risk-Aware Kinodynamic Motion Planning Under Uncertainty For Safe Navigation on Planetary Environments
Aug 11, 2026Sachin Sunil Kelkar, Tanmay Dokania, Yashwanth Kumar NakkaTrajectory Optimization Kinodynamic Motion Planning
Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, 30332 USA.
Agentic Harnesses: LLM-Driven Verification Layers for Robot Autonomy
Aug 10, 2026Rohan Bhagra, Mahantesh Halapannavar, Uddhav BhattaraiLarge Language Model-Based Robot Planning Adversarial Robustness
Carnegie Mellon University, Department of Information Systems

Sep 23, 2026, cs.ROJ/K move · Enter open · S save

Turning Safety into Competence: Minimally Exploitable Robot Policies via Safety-Filtered Reinforcement Learning

Ruihan Wu, Rui Yang, Donggeon David Oh, Duy Nguyen+1

Department of Computer Science, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA

Sequential MARL RL for Robotics Reinforcement Learning Robot Safety Safety Filtering Safe RL+1

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Robots deployed for competitive tasks must outmaneuver their opponents without sacrificing safety. Existing approaches, including safe reinforcement learning (RL), train a single policy to achieve task success and avoid failures simultaneously. This coupling can complicate training and leave the learned policy exploitable by deliberate attacks. We propose Safety to Competence (S2C), a two-stage RL framework that separates safety synthesis from competitive task learning. We formulate competitive interactions as safety-critical Markov games and prove that perfect filtering preserves policy non-exploitability when all players commit to safe maneuvers. S2C learns a robust safety filter via adversarial RL, embeds it in the environment during task policy training, and retains the same filter at deployment. In simulated touchdown games, S2C outperforms eight safe RL baselines, achieving the highest win rate and Elo rating, and the lowest exploitability. Hardware stress tests against a human opponent confirm S2C's competence.

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