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Emergency stop (E-stop) mechanisms are the de facto standard for robot safety. However, for humanoid robots, abruptly cutting power can itself cause catastrophic failures; instead, an emergency stop must execute a predefined fallback…
This survey presents an overview of verification techniques for autonomous systems, with a focus on safety-critical autonomous cyber-physical systems (CPS) and subcomponents thereof. Autonomy in CPS is enabling by recent advances in…
"Code-as-Policy" considers how executable code can complement data-intensive Vision-Language-Action (VLA) methods, yet their effectiveness as autonomous controllers for embodied manipulation remains underexplored. We present CaP-X, an…
As AI rapidly advances, the security risks posed by AI are becoming increasingly severe, especially in critical scenarios, including those posing existential risks. If AI becomes uncontrollable, manipulated, or actively evades safety…
Robotic automation has transformed scientific workflows in domains such as chemistry and materials science, yet free-space optics, which is a high precision domain, remains largely manual. Optical systems impose strict spatial and angular…
Ensuring functional safety in human-robot interaction is challenging because AI perception is inherently probabilistic, whereas industrial standards require deterministic behavior. We present an LLM-guided safety agent for edge robotics,…
Before autonomous systems can be deployed in safety-critical applications, we must be able to understand and verify the safety of these systems. For cases where the risk or cost of real-world testing is prohibitive, we propose a…
Large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs) have the potential to transform biological research by enabling autonomous experimentation. Yet, their application remains constrained by rigid protocol design, limited…
Autonomous cyber-physical systems (CPS) rely on the correct operation of numerous components, with state-of-the-art methods relying on machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) components in various stages of sensing and…
Construction safety inspection remains mostly manual, and automated approaches still rely on task-specific datasets that are hard to maintain in fast-changing construction environments due to frequent retraining. Meanwhile, field inspection…
The rapid development of generative technology opens up possibility for higher level of automation, and artificial intelligence (AI) embodiment in robotic systems is imminent. However, due to the blackbox nature of the generative…
Several deployment locations of mobile robotic systems are human made (i.e. urban firefighter, building inspection, property security) and the manager may have access to domain-specific knowledge about the place, which can provide semantic…
This paper addresses the problem of improving response times of robots implemented in the Robotic Operating System (ROS) using formal verification of computational-time feasibility. In order to verify the real time behaviour of a robot…
As the complexity of control systems increases, the need for systematic methods to guarantee their efficacy grows as well. However, direct testing of these systems is oftentimes costly, difficult, or impractical. As a result, the test and…
A limitation for collaborative robots (cobots) is their lack of ability to adapt to human partners, who typically exhibit an immense diversity of behaviors. We present an autonomous framework as a cobot's real-time decision-making mechanism…
Despite the rapidly growing applications of robots in industry, the use of robots to automate tasks in scientific laboratories is less prolific due to lack of generalized methodologies and high cost of hardware. This paper focuses on the…
As a general trend in industrial robotics, an increasing number of safety functions are being developed or re-engineered to be handled in software rather than by physical hardware such as safety relays or interlock circuits. This trend…
The architecture of a robotics software framework tremendously influences the effort and time it takes for end users to test new concepts in a simulation environment and to control real hardware. Many years of activity in the field allowed…
Robotic systems are becoming pervasive and adopted in increasingly many domains, such as manufacturing, healthcare, and space exploration. To this end, engineering software has emerged as a crucial discipline for building maintainable and…
Known attempts to build autonomous robots rely on complex control architectures, often implemented with the Robot Operating System platform (ROS). Runtime adaptation is needed in these systems, to cope with component failures and with…