Security for multirobot systems
Distributed planning, communication, and control algorithms for autonomous robots make up a major area of research in computer science. But in the literature on multirobot systems, security has gotten relatively short shrift. In the latest issue of the journal Autonomous Robots, researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and their colleagues present a new technique for preventing malicious hackers from commandeering robot teams’ communication networks. The technique could provide an added layer of security in systems that encrypt communications, or an alternative in circumstances in which encryption is impractical. “The robotics community has focused on making multirobot systems autonomous and increasingly more capable by developing the science of autonomy. In some sense we have not done enough about systems-level issues like cybersecurity and privacy,” says Daniela Rus, an Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and senior author on the new paper. “But when we...