About ARIA Systems Group

We are a group of robot enthusiasts in the Departments of Aerospace Engineering Sciences and Computer Science at the University of Colorado Boulder set on developing Assured, Reliable, and Interactive Autonomous (ARIA) systems. We envision a world where autonomous systems operate safely and effectively alongside humans and form trusting partnerships to improve the well-being of individuals and societies. This vision drives our research in developing theoretical foundations and computational frameworks that enable reliable and intelligent autonomy. We view this as an art, a creative process that requires deep technical understandings of the fields that contribute to robotics.

The main theme of our work is safety and soundness, and the emphasis is on safe autonomy through correct-by-construction algorithmic approaches. Our research builds on knowledge developed in control theory, formal methods, statistical reasoning, machine learning & AI and seeks to address real-world challenges in robotics and safety-critical systems.

Group News

25 Aug 2025

Our research on safe and efficient decision making for robots around humans has been featured in CU News. Read the article here

15 Jul 2025

Our work on "Beyond winning strategies: Admissible and admissible winning strategies for quantitative reachability games" has been accepted for presentation the Int. Joint Conference on AI (IJCAI) 2025. Read the preprint here

17 Jul 2025

Anne Theurkauf successfully defended her PhD dissertation. Congrats Anne!

15 Jul 2025

Our work on "Bayesian Diagnosability and Active Fault Identification" has been accepted for presentation at IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) 2025. Read the preprint here

15 Jul 2025

Our work on "On Polynomial Stochastic Barrier Functions: Bernstein Versus Sum-of-Squares" has been accepted for presentation at IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) 2025. Read the preprint here

15 Jul 2025

Our work on "Piecewise Control Barrier Functions for Safe Control of Stochastic Systems" has been accepted for presentation at IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) 2025.

10 Jul 2025

Robert Reed presented his paper on ‘data-driven shielding’ at the American Control Conference (ACC) 2025. Read the preprint here!

20 Jun 2025	Morteza Lahijanian gave an invited talk in the RSS Workshop Fast motion planning and control in the era of parallelism. Watch it here
06 May 2025	Our work on "Error Bounds for Physics-Informed Neural Networks in Fokker-Planck PDEs" has been accepted for presentation in the conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI). Read the preprint here!
29 Apr 2025	Our work on "Beyond Winning Strategies: Admissible and Admissible Winning Strategies for Quantitative Reachability Games" has been accepted for presentation in International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI). Read the preprint here!
14 Apr 2025	Nicolas Perrault successfully defended his MS thesis on "Kinodynamic Sampling-Based Motion Planning with Massive Parallelism". Congrats, Nic!
28 Feb 2025	Our work on "Temporal Logic Control for Nonlinear Stochastic Systems Under Unknown Disturbances" has been accepted for presentation in Learning for Dynamics and Control Conference (L4DC). Read the preprint here!
16 Jan 2025	Our work on "Learning-Based Shielding for Safe Autonomy under Unknown Dynamics" has been accepted for presentation at the IEEE American Control Conference (ACC’25). Read the preprint here!
08 Jan 2025	Our work on "Formal Verification of Unknown Dynamical Systems via Gaussian Process Regression" has been accepted for publication in the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control (TAC). Read the preprint here!
03 Jan 2025	Our work on "Kino-PAX: Highly Parallel Kinodynamic Sampling-based Planner" has been accepted for publication in the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L). Read the preprint here!
09 Dec 2024	Our work on "Error Bounds For Gaussian Process Regression Under Bounded Support Noise With Applications To Safety Certification" has been accepted for presentation at the The Thirty-Ninth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI’25). Read the preprint here!
07 Dec 2024	ARIA will have a presence at CDC’24 in Dec. with 2 papers. Seek us out!
26 Oct 2024	Our work on "Efficient strategy synthesis for switched stochastic systems with distributional uncertainty" has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Nonlinear Analysis: Hybrid Systems (NAHS). Read the preprint here!
26 Jun 2024	Justin successfully defended his PhD thesis. Congrats, Dr. Kottinger!
30 May 2024	John successfully defended his PhD thesis. Congrats, Dr. Skovbekk!
26 Apr 2024	Our work on "Sound and Efficient Algorithms for POMDPs with Reachability Objectives via Heuristic Search" has been accepted for presentation in the conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI). The preprint will be available soon!
26 Apr 2024	Our work on "Recursively-Constrained Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes" has been accepted for presentation in the conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI). Read the preprint here!
02 Apr 2024	Kandai successfully defended his PhD thesis. Congrats, Dr. Watanabe!
28 Mar 2024	Our work on "Data-Driven Strategy Synthesis for Stochastic Systems with Unknown Nonlinear Disturbances" has been accepted for presentation in Learning for Dynamics and Control Conference (L4DC).
25 Mar 2024	Our work on "Introducing Delays in Multi-Agent Path Finding" has been accepted for presentation in Int. Symposium on Combinatorial Search (SoCS). Read the preprint here!
14 Mar 2024	Our work on "IntervalMDP.jl: Accelerated Value Iteration for Interval Markov Decision Processes" has been accepted for presentation in IFAC Conference on Analysis and Design of Hybrid Systems (ADHS). Read the preprint here!
03 Feb 2024	ARIA Systems Group will have a strong presence with Peter, Kandai, and Morteza at the NSF’s Center for Autonomous Air Mobility and Sensing (CAAMS) meeting (Feb. 6-7). Find us at the poster sessions!
31 Jan 2024	Our work on "Stochastic Games for Interactive Manipulation Domains" has been accepted for presentation in IEEE Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).
31 Jan 2024	Our work on "Optimal Planning for Timed Partial Order Specifications" has been accepted for presentation in IEEE Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).
30 Jan 2024	Our work on "Temporal Segmentation in Multi-Agent Path Finding with Applications to Explainability" has been accepted for publication in Artificial Intelligence.
28 Jan 2024	Our work on "Shielded Deep Reinforcement Learning for Complex Spacecraft Specifications" has been accepted for presentation in American Control Conference (ACC).
02 Dec 2023	Our work on "Promises of Deep Kernel Learning for Control Synthesis" has been accepted for publication in the IEEE Control Systems Letters (L-CSS). Read the preprint here!
02 Dec 2023	Our work on "Formal Abstraction of General Stochastic Systems via Noise Partitioning" has been accepted for publication in the IEEE Control Systems Letters (L-CSS). Read the preprint here!
17 Nov 2023	Our work on "Chance-Constrained Multi-Robot Motion Planning under Gaussian Uncertainties" has been accepted for publication in the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L). Read the preprint here!
16 Nov 2023	Our work on "Sampling-based Reactive Synthesis for Nondeterministic Hybrid Systems" has been accepted for publication in the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L). Read the preprint here!
01 Dec 2023	Justin Kottinger successfully passed his comprehensive exam (thesis prospectus). Congrats Justin!
10 Nov 2023	Anne Theurkauf successfully passed her comprehensive exam (thesis prospectus). Congrats Anne!
03 Nov 2023	Kandai Watanabe successfully passed his comprehensive exam (thesis prospectus). Congrats Kandai!
17 Mar 2023	Dr. Lahijanian is invited to give a talk to The Committee on the History and Philosophy of Science (CHPS) at the University of Colorado.
03 Feb 2023	Our work on "Timed Partial Order Inference Algorithm" has been accepted for presentation at AAAI Int’l Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS) 2023.
21 Jan 2023	Our work on "Interval Markov Decision Processes with Continuous Action-Spaces" has been accepted for presentation at ACM Int’l Conference on Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control (HSCC) 2023. Read the preprint here!
16 Jan 2023	Our work on "Stochastic Robustness Interval for Motion Planning with Signal Temporal Logic" has been accepted for presentation at IEEE Int’l Conf. on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2023. Read the preprint here!
16 Jan 2023	Our work on "Chance-Constrained Motion Planning with Event-Triggered Estimation" has been accepted for presentation at IEEE Int’l Conf. on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2023. Read the preprint here!
16 Jan 2023	Our work on "Planning with SiMBA: Motion Planning under Uncertainty for Temporal Goals using Simplified Belief Guides" has been accepted for presentation at IEEE Int’l Conf. on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2023. Read the preprint here!
15 Jan 2023	Ibón Gracia, welcome to the ARIA Systems Group! We are excited to have you in the team!
04 Nov 2023	Roland Ilyes successfully defended his thesis. Congratulations Roland!
15 Sep 2022	Our work on "Safety Guarantees for Neural Network Dynamic Systems via Stochastic Barrier Functions" has been accepted for presentation at Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2022. Read the preprint here!
15 Sep 2022	Our work on "An Algorithm for Learning Switched Linear Dynamics from Data" has been accepted for presentation at Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2022.
15 Jul 2022	Our work on "Automaton-Guided Control Synthesis for Signal Temporal Logic Specifications" has been accepted for presentation at IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) 2022. Read the preprint here!
15 Jul 2022	Our work on "Pareto Optimal Strategies for Event Triggered Estimation" has been accepted for presentation at IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) 2022. Read the preprint here!
30 Jun 2022	Our work on "Conflict-based Search for Multi-Robot Motion Planning with Kinodynamic Constraints" has been accepted for presentation at IEEE Int’l Conf. on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) 2022. Read the preprint here!
15 May 2022	Our work on "Formal Control Synthesis for Stochastic Neural Network Dynamic Models" has been accepted for publication in IEEE Control Systems Letters 2022. Read the preprint here!
25 Feb 2022	Our work on "Explainable Multi-Agent Path Finding Imaging" has been accepted for presentation at Int’l Conf. on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS) 2022. Read the preprint here!
31 Jan 2022	Our work on "Shielded Deep Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Sensor Spacecraft Imaging" has been accepted for presentation at American Control Conference (ACC) 2022. Read the preprint here!
31 Jan 2022	Our work on "Let’s Collaborate: Regret-based Reactive Synthesis for Robotic Manipulation" has been accepted for presentation at IEEE Int’l Conf. on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2022. Read the preprint here!
31 Jan 2022	Our work on "Gaussian Belief Trees for Chance Constrained Asymptotically Optimal Motion Planning" has been accepted for presentation at IEEE Int’l Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2022. Read the preprint here!
17 Sep 2021	Our work on "Online Mapping and Motion Planning under Uncertainty for Safe Navigation in Unknown Environments" has been accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering (T-ASE) 2021. Well done, Eric!
23 Aug 2021	Robert Reed, welcome to the ARIA Systems Group! We are excited to have you in the team!
27 Jul 2021	Our work on "Synergistic Offline-Online Control Synthesis via Local Gaussian Process Regression" has been accepted for presentation at IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) 2021. Read the preprint here!
30 Jun 2021	Our work on "Probabilistic Specification Learning for Planning with Safety Constraints" has been accepted for presentation at IEEE Int’l Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) 2021.
31 Mar 2021	Karan Muvvala successfully defended his thesis. Congratulations Karan!
28 Feb 2021	Our work on "Synthesis for Probabilistic Manipulation Domains" has been accepted for presentation at IEEE Int’l Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2021.
28 Feb 2021	Our work on "Explainable Multi-agent Motion Planning" has been accepted for presentation at IEEE Int’l Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2021.
23 Dec 2020	Our work on "Strategy synthesis for Unknown Dynamical Systems" has been accepted for presentation at ACM Conference on Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control (HSCC) 2021. Read the paper here!
18 Nov 2020	Richard Moon successfully defended his thesis. Congratulations Richard!
03 Nov 2020	Akash Ratheesh Babu successfully defended his thesis. Congratulations Akash!
03 Aug 2020	Our work on "LTLf Synthesis on Probabilistic Systems" has been accepted for presentation at the Int. Symposium on Games
24 Jul 2020	Nicholas Renninger successfully defended his thesis. Congratulations Nick!
15 Jul 2020	Our work on "Safety Verification of Unknown Dynamical Systems" has been accepted for presentation at IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) 2020. Read the paper here!
13 Jul 2020	Our work on "Towards Data-driven Verification of Unknown Dynamical Systems" has been accepted to the Robotics: Science and Systems Workshop for Explainable and Trustworthy Robot Decision Making for Scientific Data Collection. See full paper here!
13 Jul 2020	Our work on "Explainable Multi-Agent Path Finding" has been accepted to the Robotics: Science and Systems Workshop for Explainable and Trustworthy Robot Decision Making for Scientific Data Collection. See full paper here!
20 Feb 2020	ARIA Systems Group’s work on learning specifications has been featured on CEAS News. See article here!
31 Jan 2020	A paper has been accepted for publication in the IEEE Journal of Transactions on Automatic Control (TAC 2020).
20 Jan 2020	A paper has been accepted for presentation in Int. Conf. on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2020).
14 Nov 2019	The ARIA Systems Research Group Website is live!
14 Nov 2019	Franka-Robot has a new home at ARIA Systems.