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[2509.24243] SafeFlowMatcher: Safe and Fast Planning using Flow Matching with Control Barrier Functions
Summary
The paper presents SafeFlowMatcher, a new planning framework that integrates flow matching with control barrier functions to ensure safe and efficient path planning in robotics.
Why It Matters
SafeFlowMatcher addresses the critical need for safety in robotic path planning, particularly in dynamic environments. By combining flow matching with control barrier functions, it provides a method to guarantee safety while maintaining efficiency, which is essential for real-world applications in robotics.
Key Takeaways
- SafeFlowMatcher combines flow matching with control barrier functions for safer path planning.
- The framework achieves real-time efficiency while ensuring certified safety.
- It utilizes a two-phase integrator to refine candidate paths and avoid local traps.
- The method demonstrates superior performance compared to existing diffusion and FM-based approaches.
- Extensive ablation studies validate the framework's contributions to safety and efficiency.
Computer Science > Robotics arXiv:2509.24243 (cs) [Submitted on 29 Sep 2025 (v1), last revised 21 Feb 2026 (this version, v3)] Title:SafeFlowMatcher: Safe and Fast Planning using Flow Matching with Control Barrier Functions Authors:Jeongyong Yang, Seunghwan Jang, SooJean Han View a PDF of the paper titled SafeFlowMatcher: Safe and Fast Planning using Flow Matching with Control Barrier Functions, by Jeongyong Yang and 2 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Generative planners based on flow matching (FM) produce high-quality paths in a single or a few ODE steps, but their sampling dynamics offer no formal safety guarantees and can yield incomplete paths near constraints. We present SafeFlowMatcher, a planning framework that couples FM with control barrier functions (CBFs) to achieve both real-time efficiency and certified safety. SafeFlowMatcher uses a two-phase (PC) integrator: (i) a prediction phase integrates the learned FM once (or a few steps) to obtain a candidate path without intervention; (ii) a correction phase refines this path with a vanishing time-scaled vector field and a CBF-based quadratic program that minimally perturbs the vector field. We prove a barrier certificate for the resulting flow system, establishing forward invariance of a robust safe set and finite-time convergence to the safe set. In addition, by enforcing safety only on the executed path, rather than all intermediate latent paths, SafeFlowMatcher avoids distributional drift and m...