An infrastructure is provided for improving the safety of autonomous systems. An autonomous vehicle management system (AVMS) controls one or more autonomous functions or operations performed by a vehicle or machine such that the autonomous operations are performed in a safe manner. The AVMS is capable of dynamically controlling the behavior of sensors associated with a vehicle. For example, for a sensor, the AVMS can dynamically change and control what sensor data is captured by the sensor and/or communicated from the sensor to the AVMS (e.g., granularity/resolution, field of view, control zoom), when the data is captured by the sensor and/or communicated by the sensor to the AVMS (e.g., on-demand, according to a schedule), and how the data is captured by the sensor and/or communicated from the sensor to the AVMS (e.g., communication format, communication protocol, rate of data communication).