Safety-Bounded Autonomy: A Systems Architecture for Safe Distributed Robotic Systems

Autonomous robotic systems are increasingly deployed in complex and safety-critical environments including industrial automation, autonomous transportation networks, distributed drone fleets, and robotic logistics infrastructures. As these systems scale in autonomy and interconnection, ensuring reliable safety guarantees becomes a fundamental engineering challenge. This whitepaper introduces the concept of Safety-Bounded Autonomy, an architectural framework designed to enforce safety constraints directly at the system architecture level. Instead of relying solely on decision-policy correctness or runtime behavioral checks, the proposed approach embeds safety constraints within the structural layers of distributed robotic systems. The framework introduces capability-gated autonomy, where autonomous decision policies generate candidate actions that must pass through architectural validation layers before reaching the control system. These capability gates enforce safety contracts that restrict system actions to a bounded set of safe operational states. The proposed architecture is particularly relevant for distributed multi-agent robotic systems where locally safe decisions may interact to produce globally unsafe outcomes. By embedding safety constraints directly within system architecture, Safety-Bounded Autonomy enables scalable autonomous systems that remain within verifiable safety envelopes. This whitepaper provides a conceptual systems architecture for safe distributed robotics and complements the related research papers on architecture-level safety enforcement and capability-gated autonomy.