Exploiting Robotic Swarm Characteristics for Adversarial Subversion in Coverage Tasks - Robotics Institute Carnegie Mellon University

Exploiting Robotic Swarm Characteristics for Adversarial Subversion in Coverage Tasks

Navyata Sanghvi, Sasanka Nagavalli, and Katia Sycara
Conference Paper, Proceedings of 16th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS '17), pp. 511 - 519, May, 2017

Abstract

Multi-robot systems, such as swarms, with large number of members that are homogeneous and anonymous are robust to deletion and addition of members. However, these same properties that make the system robust, create vulnerabilities under certain circumstances. In this paper, we study such a case, namely the insertion by adversarial agents, called moles, that subvert the performance of the system. The adversary monitors the swarm's movements during surveillance operations for the presence of holes, i.e. areas that were left uncovered by the swarm. The adversary then adds moles that get positioned in the swarm, in such a way as to deceive the swarms regarding the existence of holes and thus preventing the swarm from discovering and repairing the holes. This problem has significant military applications. Our contributions are as follows: First, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper that studies this problem. Second, we provide a formalization of the problem. Third, we provide several algorithms, and characterize them formally and also experimentally.

BibTeX

@conference{Sanghvi-2017-18140,
author = {Navyata Sanghvi and Sasanka Nagavalli and Katia Sycara},
title = {Exploiting Robotic Swarm Characteristics for Adversarial Subversion in Coverage Tasks},
booktitle = {Proceedings of 16th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS '17)},
year = {2017},
month = {May},
pages = {511 - 519},
keywords = {Swarms, Multi-Robot Systems, Swarm Vulnerabilities},
}