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. Accelerated Spline-Based Time-Optimal Motion Planning with Continuous Safety Guarantees for Non-Differentially Flat Systems

    Mar 25, 2026Dries Dirckx, Jan Swevers, Wilm DecréMotion PlanningSafe Motion Planning

  2. From Singleton Obstacles to Clutter: Translation Invariant Compositional Avoid Sets

    Mar 23, 2026Prashant Solanki, Jasper Van Beers, Coen De VisserCollision AvoidanceReachability Analysis

    Delft University of Technology, Netherlands

  3. RTD-RAX: Fast, Safe Trajectory Planning for Systems under Unknown Disturbances

    Mar 23, 2026Evanns Morales-Cuadrado, Long Kiu Chung, Shreyas Kousik +1Safe Motion PlanningMotion Planning

    S. Coogan is also with the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

  4. High-Speed, All-Terrain Autonomy: Ensuring Safety at the Limits of Mobility

    Mar 20, 2026James R. Baxter, Bogdan I. Epureanu, Paramsothy Jayakumar +1Safe Motion PlanningOff-Road Robot Navigation

    Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI · U.S. Army Ground Vehicle Systems Center, Warren, MI

  5. Multi-Agent Motion Planning on Industrial Magnetic Levitation Platforms: A Hybrid ADMM-HOCBF approach

    Mar 20, 2026Bavo Tistaert, Stan Servaes, Alejandro Gonzalez-Garcia +4Decentralized Multi-Agent Motion PlanningMotion Planning

  6. CSSDF-Net: Safe Motion Planning Based on Neural Implicit Representations of Configuration Space Distance Field

    Mar 19, 2026Haohua Chen, Yixuan Zhou, Yifan Zhou +1Safe Motion PlanningRobot Collision Avoidance

    IRMV Lab, Department of Automation, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China.

  7. Contingency-Aware Planning via Certified Neural Hamilton-Jacobi Reachability

    Mar 17, 2026Kasidit Muenprasitivej, Derya AksaraySafe Motion PlanningRobot Navigation

    Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA, 02115

  8. CorrectionPlanner: Self-Correction Planner with Reinforcement Learning in Autonomous Driving

    Mar 16, 2026Yihong Guo, Dongqiangzi Ye, Sijia Chen +2Autonomous Driving PlanningSafe Motion Planning

    Department of Computer Science, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA. · XPENG Motors.

  9. Multi-robot Graph Traversal with Support Coordination under Stochastically Moving Adversaries

    Mar 16, 2026Manshi Limbu, Xuan Wang, Gregory J. Stein +2Multi-Robot Motion PlanningRisk-Aware Path Planning

    George Mason University

  10. Rethinking Gaussian Trajectory Predictors: Calibrated Uncertainty for Safe Planning

    Mar 11, 2026Fatemeh Cheraghi Pouria, Mahsa Golchoubian, Katherine Driggs-CampbellPedestrian Trajectory PredictionSafe Motion Planning

    Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL 61820 USA · Department of Mathematical and Computational Sciences, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

  11. PC-Diffuser: Path-Consistent Capsule CBF Safety Filtering for Diffusion-Based Trajectory Planner

    Mar 11, 2026Eugene Ku, Yiwei LyuConstrained Motion PlanningTrajectory Generation

    Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA

  12. Provably Safe Trajectory Generation for Manipulators Under Motion and Environmental Uncertainties

    Mar 10, 2026Fei Meng, Zijiang Yang, Xinyu Mao +2Safe Motion Planning

    Hong Kong Center for Construction Robotics, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China · Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China · Department of Electronic Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China +2

  13. Statistical Contraction for Chance-Constrained Trajectory Optimization of Non-Gaussian Stochastic Systems

    Mar 7, 2026Rihan Aaron D'Silva, Hiroyasu TsukamotoContraction TheoryTrajectory Optimization

    Department of Aerospace Engineering, The Grainger College of Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois 61801

  14. Control Barrier Corridors: From Safety Functions to Safe Sets

    Mar 6, 2026Ömür Arslan, Nikolay AtanasovControl Barrier FunctionsSafe Motion Planning

    Department of Mechanical Engineering, Eindhoven University of Technology, P.O. Box 513, 5600 MB Eindhoven, The Netherlands. · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA.

  15. Iterative Convex Optimization with Control Barrier Functions for Obstacle Avoidance among Polytopes

    Mar 6, 2026Shuo Liu, Zhe Huang, Calin A. BeltaRobot Collision AvoidanceSafe Motion Planning

    Boston University, Brookline, MA, USA · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and with the Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

  16. Online Generation of Collision-Free Trajectories in Dynamic Environments

    Feb 28, 2026Nermin Covic, Bakir LacevicConstrained Motion PlanningTrajectory Optimization

    Faculty of Electrical Engineering, University of Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina

  17. Layered Safety: Enhancing Autonomous Collision Avoidance via Multistage CBF Safety Filters

    Feb 27, 2026Erina Yamaguchi, Ryan M. Bena, Gilbert Bahati +1Safety-Critical ControlControl Barrier Functions

    Department of Mechanical and Civil Engineering and the Department of Aerospace, Caltech, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA

  18. Considering Perspectives for Automated Driving Ethics: Collective Risk in Vehicular Motion Planning

    Feb 26, 2026Leon Tolksdorf, Arturo Tejada, Christian Birkner +1Autonomous DrivingAutonomous Driving Planning

    Department of Dynamics and Control, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands · CARISSMA Institute of Safety in Future Mobility, Technische Hochschule Ingolstadt, Ingolstadt, Germany · TNO, Integrated Vehicle Safety, Helmond, The Netherlands

  19. Robot Local Planner: A Periodic Sampling-Based Motion Planner with Minimal Waypoints for Home Environments

    Feb 24, 2026Keisuke Takeshita, Takahiro Yamazaki, Tomohiro Ono +1RoboticsSampling-Based Motion Planning

    Frontier Research Center, Toyota Motor Corporation, Toyota, Aichi, Japan. · Department of Information Science, Faculty of Information Science, Aichi Institute of Technology, Toyota, Aichi, Japan.

  20. SafeDrive: Fine-Grained Safety Reasoning for End-to-End Driving in a Sparse World

    Feb 21, 2026Jungho Kim, Jiyong Oh, Seunghoon Yu +3Autonomous DrivingAutonomous Driving Planning

    Seoul National University, Republic of Korea

  21. RA-Nav: A Risk-Aware Navigation System Based on Semantic Segmentation for Aerial Robots in Unpredictable Environments

    Feb 19, 2026Ziyi Zong, Xin Dong, Jinwu Xiang +2Safe Robot NavigationSafe Motion Planning

  22. SPOT: Spatio-Temporal Obstacle-free Trajectory Planning for UAVs in Unknown Dynamic Environments

    Feb 1, 2026Astik Srivastava, Thomas J Chackenkulam, Bitla Bhanu Teja +2UAV NavigationSafe Motion Planning

    Robotics Research Center, IIIT Hyderabad, India · IIT-BHU, India

  23. HERMES: A Holistic End-to-End Risk-Aware Multimodal Embodied System with Vision-Language Models for Long-Tail Autonomous Driving

    Feb 1, 2026Weizhe Tang, Junwei You, Jiaxi Liu +7Long-Tail Autonomous DrivingVLMs for Autonomous Driving

    Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Madison, WI 53711 USA

  24. Precomputing Multi-Agent Path Replanning Using Temporal Flexibility

    Jan 8, 2026Issa Hanou, Eric Kemmeren, Devin Wild Thomas +1Safe Interval Path PlanningMulti-Agent Path Finding

    Delft University of Technology · University of New Hampshire

  25. Temporal Cascading of Planning and Control for Quadrotor MPC

    Dec 13, 2025Rudolf Reiter, Chao Qin, Leonard Bauersfeld +1Robot Trajectory TrackingAerial Robotics

    Robotics and Perception Group, Department of Informatics, University of Zurich, Andreasstrasse 15, 8050 Zurich, Switzerland · Institute for Aerospace Studies, University of Toronto, 4925 Dufferin Street, Toronto, ON M3H 5T6, Canada

  26. RVC-NMPC: Nonlinear Model Predictive Control with Reciprocal Velocity Constraints for Mutual Collision Avoidance in Agile UAV Flight

    Dec 9, 2025Vit Kratky, Robert Penicka, Parakh M. Gupta +2Multi-Robot Motion PlanningNonlinear MPC

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

  27. Constant-Time Planning for Chaining Collision-free Motion to Manipulation Behaviors

    Nov 30, 2025Nayesha Gandotra, Itamar Mishani, Lai Yuan +2Contact-Rich Robotic ManipulationSafe Motion Planning

    Robotics Institute, School of Computer Science Carnegie Mellon University, United States

  28. Manifold-constrained Hamilton-Jacobi Reachability Learning for Decentralized Multi-Agent Motion Planning

    Nov 5, 2025Qingyi Chen, Ruiqi Ni, Junyoung Kim +1Multi-Robot Motion PlanningConstrained Motion Planning

    Department of Computer Science at Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907, USA.

  29. ART-TEB: Adaptive Trajectory Planning for Mobile Robots in Cluttered Environments

    Oct 30, 2025Hahjin Lee, Young J. KimTrajectory OptimizationTrajectory Generation

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

  30. STITCHER: Constrained Trajectory Planning in Complex Environments with Real-Time Motion Primitive Search

    Oct 16, 2025Helene J. Levy, Brett T. LopezConstrained Motion PlanningTrajectory Generation

    VECTR Laboratory, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA