Safety in Embodied AI: A Survey of Risks, Attacks, and Defenses

Understand

Embodied Artificial Intelligence (Embodied AI) integrates perception, cognition, planning, and interaction into agents that operate in open-world, safety-critical environments.

• As these systems gain autonomy and enter domains such as transportation, healthcare, and industrial or assistive robotics, ensuring their safety becomes both technically challenging and socially indispensable.
• Unlike digital AI systems, embodied agents must act under uncertain sensing, incomplete knowledge, and dynamic human-robot interactions, where failures can directly lead to physical harm.
• This survey provides a comprehensive and structured review of safety research in embodied AI, examining attacks and defenses across the full embodied pipeline, from perception and cognition to planning, action and interaction, and agentic system.