Safe Motion Planning

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Overview

Safe motion planning studies how robots and vehicles can reach goals without collisions while respecting limits on their motion and the environment. Common approaches include control barrier functions, reachability analysis, and model predictive control, alongside graph search, sampling-based planning, and optimization. Learning-based planners increasingly use diffusion models, world models, and risk predictions, often paired with safety filters or formal checks; they are tested in settings such as autonomous driving, UAV flight, manipulation, and multi-robot navigation. A central challenge is balancing reliable safety guarantees under uncertain perception and dynamics with plans that are efficient, responsive, and not overly conservative.

Latest papers

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215 papers30 papers in the last four weeks, up 36% on the four weeks before. 0.2% of all new papers.

  1. Learning Side-by-Side Navigation for Personal Mobility Vehicles from Human Drivers

    Oct 27, 2026Luis Yoichi Morales, Florent FerreriMulti-Robot Motion PlanningAutonomous Driving

  2. Continuous-Time Safe Planning and Control for Agile Quadrupeds

    Oct 26, 2026Gage MacLin, Mason Peterson, Camilla Tabasso +4Safe Motion PlanningQuadruped Robot Navigation

    Amazon Fulfillment Technologies & Robotics, Westborough MA, USA. · University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52240. · Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.

  3. Interpretable Collision Avoidance and Feasibility Guarantees through an Uncertainty Aware Pipeline

    Oct 23, 2026Doris Xu, Jin Hyun Park, Guadalupe Alvarado Fernandez +2Safe Motion PlanningRobot Collision Avoidance

    The authors are with the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, 14850.

  4. Integrating Flow Matching and Model Predictive Control for Safe Robot Navigation

    Oct 21, 2026Philipp Holzmann, Maik Pfefferkorn, Joao Carvalho +5Robot Motion PlanningSafe Motion Planning

    Control and Cyber-Physical Systems Laboratory, Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany · Intelligent Autonomous Systems Laboratory, Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany · German Research Center for AI (DFKI), Research Department SAIROL +3

  5. TrajEdit: Real-Time Flow-Matching Trajectory Adaptation via FlowEdit and CBF Safety Filter

    Oct 16, 2026Wondmgezahu Teshome, Arya Honarpisheh, Octavia Camps +1Safe Motion Planning

    Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA.

  6. FLASH-CBF-RRT: Fast Lipschitz-Adaptive Safe Horizon CBF Steering for Certified Motion Planning

    Oct 16, 2026Mani Amani, Hesam Mojtahedi, Reza Akhavian +2Motion PlanningSafe Motion Planning

    Department of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA, USA · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA

  7. Safe and Fuel-Efficient Motion Planning for Lunar Propulsive Drones

    Oct 15, 2026Elena Wittemyer, Grace GaoMotion PlanningSafe Motion Planning

    Stanford University, William F. Durand Building, 496 Lomita Mall, Stanford, CA 94305

  8. CLIS-MPPI: Closed-Loop Model Predictive Path Integral Control With Initial-State Sampling Under Execution Delay

    Oct 15, 2026Zidong Liu, Xu ChenMPPI ControlRobot Motion Planning

    Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA.

  9. Learning Keypoint Constraints from Visual Demonstrations for Safe Motion Planning

    Oct 13, 2026Zheng Qiu, Zhouyu Zhang, Ninghan Zhong +1Robot Motion PlanningSafe Motion Planning

  10. LiDAR-based Humanoid Navigation in Dynamic, Non-Convex Environments via Spatio-Temporal Safe Corridors

    Oct 12, 2026Shubham S. Kumbhar, Panagiotis ArtemiadisRobot NavigationSafe Motion Planning

    the Mechanical Engineering Department, at the University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716, USA

  11. Efficient Hybrid Hard--Soft Signal Temporal Logic MPC for Driving under Multimodal Uncertainty

    Oct 11, 2026Kumar Manas, Adrian PaschkeSTL PlanningSafe Motion Planning

    Technical University Darmstadt, Germany · Freie Universität Berlin, Germany · Freie Universität Berlin and Fraunhofer FOKUS, Berlin, Germany

  12. Funnel planning and control for manipulators using neural Signed Configuration Distance Functions

    Oct 10, 2026Bernhard Wullt, Christos K. Verginis, Per Mattsson +2Safe Motion PlanningKinodynamic Motion Planning

    ABB Robotics, Sweden · the Division of Signals and Systems, Department of Electrical Engineering, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden · the Division of Systems and Control, Department of Information Technology, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden

  13. CSF: Contextual Safety Filtering for Motion Generators

    Oct 8, 2026Lizhi Yang, Yiling Hou, Yao Tang +4Safety FilteringRobot Safety

    California Institute of Technology, CA 91125, USA · New York University, NY 10012, USA

  14. BridgeGuard: Explicit Safety Drift for Diffusion-based Autonomous Driving

    Oct 8, 2026Zhenjun Qiu, Jianing Huang, Dongang Liu +6Safe Motion PlanningDiffusion-Based Planning

    Bosch Research · Shanghai Jiao Tong University

  15. MeshSIPP: Efficient Lattice Planning in Dynamic Environment

    Oct 7, 2026Marat Agranovskiy, Konstantin YakovlevSafe Interval Path PlanningMotion Planning

  16. Adaptive Risk-Certified Event-Triggered Replanning for Dynamic Navigation

    Oct 7, 2026Richie R. Suganda, Bin HuRisk-Aware Path PlanningSafe Motion Planning

    Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer University of Houston Houston, TX 77004, USA · Department of Engineering Technology University of Houston Houston, TX 77004, USA

  17. Distribution-Transfer Safe-Horizon MPC under Mode Uncertainty

    Oct 5, 2026Stephen Crawford, Nora AyanianChance-Constrained Motion PlanningModel Predictive Control

    Department of Computer Science, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA.

  18. Propagating Elevation-Map Uncertainty Through the Contact Maximum in Closed Form

    Oct 5, 2026Aleš Kučera, Karel ZimmermannUncertainty QuantificationSafe Motion Planning

    Department of Cybernetics, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Czech Technical University in Prague, Prague, Czech Republic

  19. Dynamics-Aware Adaptive Corridors with Feasibility-Perturbed Trust-Region SQP for Certified Nonholonomic Motion Planning

    Oct 5, 2026Yang ShiConstrained Motion PlanningTrajectory Generation

    Jiangsu College of Safety Technology, Jiangsu, China

  20. GJK-CBF: Control Barrier Functions for Convex Rigid Body Collision Avoidance on SE(3)

    Oct 4, 2026Yi-Hsuan Chen, Shuo Liu, Wei Xiao +2Collision AvoidanceRobot Collision Avoidance

    Department of Aerospace Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA · Department of Mechanical Engineering, Boston University, Boston, MA 02215, USA · School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, and with M3S, SMART, Singapore +1

  21. RiskFly: Frustum-Aligned Spatio-Temporal Risk Fields for One-Stage Agile Flight in Dynamic Clutter

    Oct 3, 2026Luxia Ai, Haopeng Chen, Yuchao Mei +2UAV NavigationSafe Motion Planning

    State Key Laboratory of Multispectral Information Intelligent Processing Technology, School of Artificial Intelligence and Automation, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China

  22. Towards Safer Autonomous Driving in an Open World: A Dual-Process Approach

    Oct 2, 2026Simon Janssen, Michiel Braat, Chris van der Ploeg +2Autonomous DrivingAutonomous Driving Planning

    Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research, Integrated Vehicle Safety Group, 5700 AT Helmond, The Netherlands · Eindhoven University of Technology, Dynamics and Control Group, Mechanical Engineering Dept., P.O. Box 513, 5600 MB, Eindhoven, The Netherlands · Radboud University, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, P.O.Box 9010, 6500 GL, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

  23. Optimal Planning in a Dynamic World

    Oct 2, 2026Devin Wild Thomas, Solomon Eyal Shimony, Wheeler Ruml +3Safe Interval Path PlanningMotion Planning

    University of New Hampshire, USA · Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel · Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Israel +3

  24. Safe Streaming Flow Planning by Aligning Sampling Dynamics with Execution Dynamics

    Oct 2, 2026Seunghwan Jang, Jeongyong Yang, Siddharth Ancha +1Goal-Conditioned PlanningSafe Motion Planning

    Nanyang Technological University Singapore · KAIST Daejeon, Republic of Korea · University of Washington Seattle, WA, USA +1

  25. Closed-Loop Refinement and Execution for Learned Driving Planners

    Oct 1, 2026Huaijin Hu, Shanting Wang, Zhongyu Mo +1Model Predictive ControlSafe Motion Planning

    Systems Engineering Program, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853 USA

  26. FORTE: Forecasting Occupancy for Spatiotemporal Risk-Aware Planning in Dynamic Environments

    Sep 30, 2026Hahjin Lee, Young J. KimRobot NavigationSafe Motion Planning

    Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Ewha Womans University in Korea

  27. Efficient Multi-Modal Planning with Reward-Guided Preference Optimization for Autonomous Driving

    Sep 30, 2026Chenglin Chen, Lujia Wang, Xinhu Zheng +2Safe Motion PlanningAutonomous Driving Planning

  28. A Reachability-based Safety Certificate for Dynamical System Motion Policies

    Sep 29, 2026Aditya Vats, Tianyi Xia, Nadia FigueroaReachability AnalysisSafety-Critical Control

    The authors are with the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA.

  29. Foundation-Model-Guided Topology-Aware Semantic Risk Fields for Manipulation

    Sep 29, 2026Giung Lee, Weihang Guo, Lydia E. KavrakiRobot SafetyRobotic Manipulation

    Department of Computer Science, Rice University, Houston, TX, USA

  30. Trajectory-Level Mode Guidance for Controllable Diffusion-Based Multi-Robot Motion Planning

    Sep 29, 2026Tianyou Yu, Shengze Cai, Chao XuMulti-Robot Motion PlanningTrajectory Generation

    Institute of Cyber-System and Control, College of Control Science and Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China