Confidence Boosts Trust-Based Resilience in Cooperative Multi-Robot Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a resilient multi-robot coordination protocol that leverages physical communication channels and confidence parameters to detect malicious robots, ensuring robust operation even with multiple adversaries.

Contribution

It proposes a novel trust-based protocol using physical channel data and confidence parameters, with analytical guarantees for resilience against many malicious robots.

Findings

Protocol achieves resilient coordination with many malicious robots.

Tuning confidence parameter balances coordination and quickness.

Numerical experiments validate effectiveness with spoofed autonomous cars.

Abstract

Wireless communication-based multi-robot systems open the door to cyberattacks that can disrupt safety and performance of collaborative robots. The physical channel supporting inter-robot communication offers an attractive opportunity to decouple the detection of malicious robots from task-relevant data exchange between legitimate robots. Yet, trustworthiness indications coming from physical channels are uncertain and must be handled with this in mind. In this paper, we propose a resilient protocol for multi-robot operation wherein a parameter {\lambda}t accounts for how confident a robot is about the legitimacy of nearby robots that the physical channel indicates. Analytical results prove that our protocol achieves resilient coordination with arbitrarily many malicious robots under mild assumptions. Tuning {\lambda}t allows a designer to trade between near-optimal inter-robot coordination and quick task execution; see Fig. 1. This is a fundamental performance tradeoff and must be carefully evaluated based on the task at hand. The effectiveness of our approach is numerically verified with experiments involving platoons of autonomous cars where some vehicles are maliciously spoofed.