Welcome to the Safe and Intelligent Autonomy (SIA) Lab! SIA Lab is part of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford. The central question our lab aims to answer is how can we enable robots to leverage the capabilities offered by modern ML and AI methods while maintaining safety guarantees?
Towards this goal, we develop theory and computational tools for robot safety verification (e.g., neural reachability methods for high-dimensional and black-box systems) and integrate them into different stages of the learning lifecycle. This includes methods to provide safety assurances during the design and training phase (e.g., via safety-guided data collection and learning correct-by-construction robot policies); continuous safety monitoring during test and deployment (e.g., through uncertainty quantification, anomaly detection, and safety shielding); and dynamically adapting to new safety risks during the robot’s lifecycle (e.g., via developing new stress-testing methods that expose hidden AI failure modes, trace their root causes, and enable targeted fixes). Our work is applied in a variety of domains, such as flying vehicles (quadrotors, eVTOLs), quadrupeds, autonomous cars, space exploration, and manipulation.
Please see this talk for a nice summary of the latest research directions in our group.
We are looking for undergraduate and graduate students to join our research group. If you are interested in robotics, control, and/or machine learning, consider joining us!
News
[June 2026] The SIA lab has a new rotating PhD student, Thomas MacLean, a visiting postdoc, Ajay Suresha Sathya, two new visiting students Yunus Yazoglu from ETH and Akira Hatakeyama from JAXA. Welcome!
[June 2026] Congrats to Umut, Aryaman, and Zeyuan, for starting your internships with the Toyota Research Institute, Honda Research Institute, and Amazon Robotics! Congratulations to our UG&MS students as well! Joonwon will start his PhD at Georgia Tech; Le will start her PhD at CMU; Aditya will start his PhD at UPenn. Santiago and Luca will start working at Blue Origin and Archer, respectively.
[June 2026] Four papers from SIA Lab have been presented at ICRA 2026. Congratulations to Albert, Javier, Kaustav, and Ryan (in collaboration with Dr. Sylvia Herbert)!
[May 2026] Huge congratulations to Dr. Kaustav Chakraborty for becoming the second member to graduate from our lab! And another huge congratulations to Dr. Javier Borquez, who graduated last year and has since become a faculty member in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Universidad de Santiago de Chile! (PS: Zeyuan's fault for the late updates XD)
[May 2026] Hao, Javier, Jason, and Zeyuan, along with a large team, will present a tutorial on reachability and CBF at CDC 2026!
[May 2026] Congratulations to Sathwik and Aryaman for winning the Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship (roughly 16 finalists out of 300 applications)!
[May 2026] Congratulations to Dr. Somil Bansal for receiving the IEEE Early Career Award in Robotics and Automation from the Robotics and Automation Society!
[April 2026] Colton has received the inaugural Stanford Robotics Fellowship to develop reliable monitoring and intervention schemes for VLAs. Congrats!
[April 2026] Congratulations Hao and Colton, for the paper acceptance to RSS 2026!
[April 2026] We started a three-year project with Toyota Research Institute, focusing on safety in high-speed driving!
[March 2026] The SIA lab has a new visiting student, Ali Fuat Sahin from EPFL, and an MS student member Joseph Lee from Stanford. Welcome!
[March 2026] Congratulations Le and Umut, for your paper acceptance to IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters!
[January 2026] The SIA lab has a new rotating PhD student, Jearyoung Lee. Welcome!
[December 2025] Congratulations Albert, for your paper acceptance to L4DC 2026!
[December 2025] Congratulations Kaustav and Zeyuan, for your paper acceptance to IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters!
[September 2025] New paper on detecting and steering misalignment in LLMs via latent reachability.
[June 2025] New paper on Safe and Performant Deployment of Autonomous Systems via Model Predictive Control and Hamilton-Jacobi Reachability Analysis is out on arXiv.
[June 2025] New paper Unsupervised Discovery of Failure Taxonomies from Deployment Logs is out on arXiv.
[June 2025] Congratulations Javier, Luke, and Umut, for your paper acceptance to IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters.
[June 2025] Congratulations Manan and Aditya, for your paper acceptance to International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2025.
[May 2025] New paper on Reachability Barrier Networks: Learning Hamilton-Jacobi Solutions for Smooth and Flexible Control Barrier Functions is out on arXiv.
[April 2025] Congratulations Zeyuan and Le, for your paper acceptance to Robotics Sciences and Systems (RSS), 2025.
[January 2025] Five papers from SIA Lab have been accepted to ICRA 2025. Congratulations, Umut, Kaustav, Vamsi, Aditya, and Zeyuan!