English

Safe and Stable Neural Network Dynamical Systems for Robot Motion Planning

Robotics 2026-02-03 v2 Systems and Control Systems and Control

Abstract

Learning safe and stable robot motions from demonstrations remains a challenge, especially in complex, nonlinear tasks involving dynamic, obstacle-rich environments. In this paper, we propose Safe and Stable Neural Network Dynamical Systems S2^2-NNDS, a learning-from-demonstration framework that simultaneously learns expressive neural dynamical systems alongside neural Lyapunov stability and barrier safety certificates. Unlike traditional approaches with restrictive polynomial parameterizations, S2^2-NNDS leverages neural networks to capture complex robot motions, providing probabilistic guarantees through split conformal prediction in learned certificates. Experimental results in various 2D and 3D datasets -- including LASA handwriting and demonstrations recorded kinesthetically from the Franka Emika Panda robot -- validate the effectiveness of S2^2-NNDS in learning robust, safe, and stable motions from potentially unsafe demonstrations. The source code, supplementary material and experiment videos can be accessed via https://github.com/allemmbinn/S2NNDS

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2511.20593,
  title  = {Safe and Stable Neural Network Dynamical Systems for Robot Motion Planning},
  author = {Allen Emmanuel Binny and Mahathi Anand and Hugo T. M. Kussaba and Lingyun Chen and Shreenabh Agrawal and Fares J. Abu-Dakka and Abdalla Swikir},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.20593},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Accepted for publication in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L)

R2 v1 2026-07-01T07:54:42.789Z