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

26 Feb 2026

Our work on "Piecewise Stochastic Barrier Functions" has been accepted for publication in Automatica. Read the preprint here!

29 Jan 2026

Our work on "Data-Driven Control via Conditional Mean Embeddings: Formal Guarantees via Uncertain MDP Abstraction" has been accepted for presentation at the Conference on Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control (HSCC), 2026. Read the preprint here!

14 Jan 2026

The American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) has posted an article about our recent work in making human-robot interactions safer. Read the article here!

03 Dec 2025

Robert Reed successfully passed his comprehensive exam (thesis prospectus). Congrats Robert!

07 Nov 2025

Our work on "Universal Learning of Stochastic Dynamics for Exact Belief Propagation using Bernstein Normalizing Flows" has been accepted for presentation at the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) 2026. Read the preprint here!

26 Sep 2025

Qi Heng successfully defended his PhD dissertation. Congrats Qi Heng!

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!