As automated systems grow more complex and expand to operate autonomously in open environments, ensuring safe operation solely through testing-based system verification becomes increasingly impractical. The Functional Safety Control research group therefore aims to redefine how the functional safety of automation systems is assured: our goal is to reduce the testing effort required for system verification by formally ensuring safety-related specifications in the design process without imposing overly conservative system behavior.

We pursue this mission by developing safe-by-design methods that make functional safety a formally verifiable property of the system design, rather than a conclusion drawn from testing. Our work spans three tightly connected layers: formal controller synthesis methods that provide robust safety guarantees, safe motion planning algorithms that maintain these guarantees under real-world uncertainty, and compositional verification approaches that establish system-level functional safety through the formal verification of individual automation components and their interfaces. 

What sets our work apart from established robust control and formal verification approaches is the integration of all three layers within a unified control-theoretic framework, grounded in reachability analysis and differential game theory. This enables scalable, formally verified safety across complete automation architectures, aligned with regulatory certification standards such as ISO 26262 and IEC 61508. 

Working with industry partners in the automotive, robotics, and manufacturing sectors, we develop and validate our methods on application domains where ensuring functional safety without imposing overly conservative system behavior is particularly demanding: autonomous vehicles, mobile robots, industrial robots, and nanopositioning actuators.