Safety-Critical Control

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Overview

Safety-critical control studies how to make robots, vehicles, industrial processes, and other dynamical systems obey hard limits while still completing tasks. Common tools include control barrier functions and safety filters, reachability and invariant-set methods, model predictive control, and runtime-assurance shields that intervene on learned or nominal policies. Work also combines these guarantees with reinforcement learning, neural models, and calibrated uncertainty methods such as conformal prediction, with evaluations in navigation, manipulation, autonomous driving, and aerospace. A central challenge is balancing formal guarantees with model error, partial observation, actuator limits, and real-time computation: conservative filters can become infeasible or impede progress, while empirical success alone does not establish safety.

Latest papers

CardsList

129 papers19 papers in the last four weeks, up 6% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. Accelerating Nonlinear MPC by Behavior Cloning with Separated Timescales: Application to Nuclear Reactor Load-Following

    Oct 28, 2026Perceval Beja-Battais, Alain Grosset{ê}te, Nicolas VayatisBehavior CloningNonlinear MPC

    CB

  2. Context-dependent Runtime Construction of Safe Regions of Attraction from Design-Time Identification for Multi-Candidate Simplex Architectures

    Oct 26, 2026Georg Jäger, Nils-Jonathan Friedrich, Norman Seyffer +2Safety-Critical ControlRuntime Assurance

    Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, TU Bergakademie Freiberg, Freiberg, Germany · LASIGE, Faculty of Sciences, University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal

  3. A Differentiable Chassis Safety Layer for Intelligent Vehicle Motion Control

    Oct 24, 2026Lu Xiong, Xuge Hu, Yufei Song +2Safety-Critical ControlAutonomous Driving

    Key Laboratory of Road and Traffic Engineering of the Ministry of Education, Tongji University, Shanghai, China · College of Automotive and Energy Engineering, Tongji University, Shanghai, China

  4. SEVI: Safe Evidential Real-World Reinforcement Learning

    Oct 22, 2026Shaekh Mohammad Shithil, Lantao LiuSafe RLRobotic RL

    Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47408 USA

  5. Enumeration-Guided Training of Neural Hamilton-Jacobi Safety Certificates

    Oct 20, 2026Mihaela-Larisa Clement, Tosca Pierro, Ezio Bartocci +1Safety-Critical ControlReachability Analysis

    TU Wien, Vienna, Austria · AIT Austrian Institute of Technology, Vienna, Austria · Università Politecnica delle Marche, Italy

  6. Filtering for Liveness: Recurrence via Backup Reachability Control Barrier Functions

    Oct 12, 2026David E. J. van Wijk, Pio Ong, Aaron D. Ames +1Control Barrier FunctionsSafety-Critical Control

    Amazon SAF Lab · Department of Mechanical and Civil Engineering, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA

  7. Reach-Avoid Certificates for Contact-based Stochastic Hybrid Systems

    Oct 12, 2026Tianyi Xia, Ryan K. CosnerSafety-Critical ControlDynamical Systems

    GRASP Lab, University of Pennsylvania, PA 19104, USA · the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Tufts University, 419 Boston Avenue, Medford, MA 02155, USA

  8. Can agents whose sole duty is to keep humans alive be hijacked to kill? Delayed multi-turn derived-action trap attacks in simulated high-stakes environments

    Oct 10, 2026Josef A. HabdankPrompt Injection Attacks on AI AgentsPrompt Injection Attacks

    DXC Technology

  9. Safety-Critical Quadrotor Navigation Using Fourth-Order Control Barrier Functions with Full Nonlinear Quadrotor Dynamics

    Oct 10, 2026Yanze Liu, Yaşar İdikut, Dhruv Madhusudan Agrawal +2Safety-Critical ControlQuadrotor Control

    Department of Robotics Engineering, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, MA 01609 USA · Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

  10. Digital Twin for Pre-Deployment Validation of AI-Driven Safety-Critical Industrial Edge Control Loops

    Oct 8, 2026Sara Cavallero, Federico Tonini, Tony Chahoud +5Digital TwinsCyber-Physical Systems

    National Laboratory of Wireless Communications of CNIT (Wilab, CNIT), Italy · DEI, University of Bologna, Italy · WiLab CNIT, Italy +1

  11. LBA-CBF: Rapidly Adaptive Safety Filters via Parallel Dynamics Inference

    Oct 6, 2026Maitham F. AL-Sunni, Timeea-Andreea Radu, Hassan Almubarak +4Safety-Critical ControlControl Barrier Functions

    Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA · School of Computer Science & Engineering, Constructor University, Bremen, Germany · Control & Instrumentation Engineering Department, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia +1

  12. SoK: Semantic Decision Engines in Network Control Loops

    Oct 5, 2026Delong Li, Chen Li, Xu Wang +3Safety-Critical ControlRuntime Assurance

    School of Electrical, Mechanical and Biomedical Engineering University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, Australia

  13. Structured Representation Learning for Behavior Cloning: How can we learn to safely control a nuclear power plant?

    Oct 5, 2026Perceval Beja-Battais, Alain Grosset{ê}te, Nicolas VayatisRepresentation LearningSafety-Critical Control

    CB

  14. Neural Barriers: An Online Certifiable Learning-enhanced Adaptive High Order Safety Critical Control

    Oct 4, 2026Lishuo Pan, Mattia Catellani, An Cao +2Safety-Critical ControlControl Barrier Functions

    Department of Computer Science, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912 USA · Department of Sciences and Methods for Engineering, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, 41121 Modena, Italy · Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125 USA

  15. Latent Safety Filters: When a Lossy Encoder Admits a Transferable Certificate

    Oct 3, 2026Johannes Mootz, Zahra Nili Ahmadabadi, Reza AkhavianSafety-Critical ControlControl Barrier Functions

    Department of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA 92182, USA. · Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA. · Department of Mechanical Engineering, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA 92182, USA.

  16. Finite-Data Safety Informativity Under Dynamic Asymmetric Actuation

    Oct 1, 2026Abhinav Sinha, Praveen Kumar Ranjan, Yongcan CaoSafety-Critical ControlRobust Control

    GALACxIS Lab, Department of Aerospace Engineering, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH 45221, USA · Unmanned Systems Lab (USL), Department of Electrical Engineering, The University of Texas at San Antonio, TX 78249, USA

  17. An Empirical Study of Architectural Shift from Traditional to AI-Enabled Simulink Controllers

    Sep 29, 2026Hadiza Umar Yusuf, Khouloud GaaloulCyber-Physical SystemsSafety-Critical Control

    University of Michigan-Dearborn Dearborn, USA.

  18. 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.

  19. Safe-by-Design Learning via Energy-based Neural Networks

    Sep 29, 2026Simone Betteti, Morteza Lahijanian, Luca LaurentiSafety-Critical ControlControl Barrier Functions

    RIAS Lab The Italian Institute of Artificial Intelligence for Industry Torino, 10129, ITA · RECUV University of Colorado Boulder Boulder, CO 80303, USA · Delft Center for Systems and Control, TU Delft, Delft, 2600 AA, The Netherlands

  20. Adaptive Safety Filtering for Frozen ACC Policies via Conformal Residual Calibration

    Sep 28, 2026Zhiruo Zhou, Rigaudiere Z. Li, Chen Xiwen +3Safety-Critical ControlAutonomous Driving Safety Evaluation

    Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University, Shenzhen, China · Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan, China · Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China

  21. Predictive Semantic Safety: From Visual Physical Reasoning to Safety-Critical Control

    Sep 28, 2026Taekyung Kim, Salem Fradi, Yanning Dai +2Robotic ControlSafety-Critical Control

    Department of Robotics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA · Center of Excellence in Generative AI, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Thuwal, Saudi Arabia. · Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence Research (IDSIA), Switzerland. +2

  22. LEAP-CBF: A Safety Filter for Uncertain Systems with Least-Effort Adversarial Potentials

    Sep 23, 2026Oswin So, Eric Yu, Chuchu FanSafety-Critical ControlControl Barrier Functions

    Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

  23. Control Barrier Functions for Safe Free-Flying Robotic Spacecraft Operations in Tumbling Target Capture

    Sep 22, 2026Alexander Meinert, Peter Stadler, Niklas Baldauf +1Space RoboticsSafety-Critical Control

    Space Applications Group, e:fs TechHub GmbH, Gaimersheim, Germany · Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, Ingolstadt University of Applied Sciences, Germany

  24. Higher-Order Approximation of Exit Functionals in Sampling-Based Stochastic Model Predictive Control

    Sep 21, 2026Sashank Modali, Takashi TanakaSafety-Critical ControlStochastic Optimal Control

    School of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Purdue University, IN 47906

  25. BarrierFormer: Transformer-Guided Predictive Barrier Enforcement for Safe Robot Control

    Sep 20, 2026Anandsingh Chauhan, Kunal GargRobot Policy LearningSafety-Critical Control

    Arizona State University

  26. Safety-Critical Control under Uncertainty via Adaptive Conformal Quantile Prediction Intervals

    Sep 20, 2026Hao Zhou, Yanze Zhang, Yiwei Lyu +1Safety-Critical ControlConformal Prediction

    Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois Chicago, Chicago, IL, 60607, USA · Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, 77843, USA

  27. Feasibility and Singularity in High-Order Safety-Critical Control for Quadrotor UAVs

    Sep 16, 2026Omayra Yago Nieto, Leonardo ColomboSafety-Critical ControlControl Barrier Functions

    Universidad Polit´ecnica de Madrid, Spain · Centre for Automation and Robotics (CSIC-UPM), Ctra. M300 Campo Real, Km 0,200, Arganda del Rey - 28500 Madrid, Spain

  28. Timely Activation of Safety Filters via One-Step Reachability Expansion

    Sep 15, 2026Javier BorquezReachability AnalysisSafety-Critical Control

    Universidad de Santiago de Chile Santiago, Chile

  29. Hamilton-Jacobi Reachability for Hybrid Systems: Unified Goal-Driven Control with Safety Guarantees

    Sep 15, 2026Javier Borquez, Shuang Peng, Somil BansalRobotic ControlReachability Analysis

    Universidad de Santiago de Chile · University of Southern California · Stanford University

  30. Escape-Aware Control Barrier Functions for Quadrotor Safety under Body-Rate Limits

    Sep 15, 2026Lei Shi, Haosong Wen, Qichao LiuSafety-Critical ControlControl Barrier Functions

    University of Wisconsin–Madison · Southeast University · The Hong Kong Polytechnic University