Full dissertation title: Secure multi-robot systems: threat identification and countermeasure development

Thesis Summary:
The public use of multi-robot systems has increased significantly and such systems require enormous interaction for networking, computation, communication and control. For example, a typical multi-robot application exchanges a lot of information between sensors, actuators, controllers, and networks over cyberspace, all of which provide entry points for attackers. This brings new challenges related to insecure systems, potentially leading to massive performance degradation or even security issues.

In this thesis we address issues related to the security of multi-robot systems, covering key aspects such as threat identification methodologies and countermeasure developments. Specifically, this thesis proposes attack diagnostic methods and attack resilient control systems to ensure the security of multi-robot systems, with the following objectives: i) introducing types of attacks that can occur on a robotic system and the associated system requirements to model and understand how a cyber -adversary can influence the operation of the system; ii) developing an attack diagnostic scheme to enable each robot in multi-robot systems to continuously monitor anomalies caused by hostile actions; iii) designing an attack-resistant controller that can adapt to abnormal situations so that the overall system continues to serve its purpose, thus mitigating the impact of attacks; and iv) to evaluate the performance of the proposed systems using both numerical simulations and experiments with real robots. With these objectives, the methodologies proposed in this thesis consist of two phases: attack detection and countermeasure. The attack detection phase is intended to determine whether an agent is under attack in multi-robot systems. Any abrupt change or unexpected dynamic behavior is identified by a stochastic process-based local diagnosis system. The countermeasure phase is intended to protect the entire team from enemy attacks. Attack-resistant control algorithms are leveraged to restore desired performance and ensure continued safe operation of the system. Thus, the proposed methods ensure the desired control performance of multi-robot systems in the presence of different types of attacks. This approach is also able to provide secure and attack-resistant control of multi-vehicle systems, where each vehicle is modeled as a non-linear system.

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