Ensuring Safe Physical AI in Urban Mobility via Hazard-Informed Synthesized Envelopes

As robots increasingly share city streets and sidewalks with people, ensuring safety can't just be handled by isolated software modules --- it needs to span the whole system. This paper proposes hazard-informed safety envelopes that connect systematic hazard analysis to real-time runtime enforcement, unifying symbolic, spatial, and dynamic representations of the environment. The framework is designed to plug directly into physical AI runtime harnesses. Applications include delivery robots, autonomous urban vehicles, and any human-robot interaction system operating in unpredictable public spaces where safety guarantees are critical. Authors: Alexei Odinokov, Rostislav Yavorskiy Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14481v1