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Conformal Safety Monitoring for Flight Testing: A Case Study in Data-Driven Safety Learning

Aaron O. Feldman, D. Isaiah Harp, Mac Schwager, Joseph Duncan

ICRA 2025 Workshop on Robot safety under uncertainty from “intangible” specifications, 2025

Abstract

We develop a data-driven approach for runtime safety monitoring in flight testing, where pilots perform maneuvers on aircraft with uncertain parameters. Because safety violations can arise unexpectedly as a result of these uncertainties, pilots need clear, preemptive criteria to abort the maneuver in advance of safety violation. To solve this problem, we use offline stochastic trajectory simulation to learn a calibrated statistical model of the short-term safety risk facing pilots. We use flight testing as a motivating example for data-driven learning/monitoring of safety due to its inherent safety risk, uncertainty, and human-interaction. However, our approach consists of three broadly-applicable components: a model to predict future state from recent observations, a nearest neighbor model to classify the safety of the predicted state, and classifier calibration via conformal prediction. We evaluate our method on a flight dynamics model with uncertain parameters, demonstrating its ability to reliably identify unsafe scenarios, match theoretical guarantees, and outperform baseline approaches in preemptive classification of risk.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{feldman2025icra,
  author = {Feldman, Aaron O. and Harp, D. Isaiah and Schwager, Mac and Duncan, Joseph},
  title = {Conformal Safety Monitoring for Flight Testing: A Case Study in Data-Driven Safety Learning},
  booktitle = {ICRA 2025 Workshop on Robot safety under uncertainty from “intangible” specifications},
  year = {2025},
  keywords = {statistics, uncertainty quantification, safety}
}