Multi-Link Safety Filtering for VLA Policies Around Moving Hazards
A vision-language-action (VLA) policy can finish a manipulation task while knocking over objects unrelated to it, so task success alone does not show that the policy is safe to deploy in clutter. We study how to keep a pretrained VLA policy clear of such hazards at run time without retraining it, which requires guarding more of the arm than the end effector, following the hazard as it moves, and sharing onboard compute with the policy. Our training-free shield covers the gripper, wrist, and forearm with five ellipsoids and filters every commanded motion through one barrier program against a keep-out ellipsoid fitted from RGB-D perception at reset. Sparse optical flow then carries that ell...
| Authors | Yatharth Agarwal, Vijay Raghunathan |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.RO |
| Published | 30 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 30 September 2026 |
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