Multi-Robot Coordination with Adversarial Perception

This paper investigates the resilience of perception-based multi-robot coordination with wireless communication to online adversarial perception. A systematic study of this problem is essential for many safety-critical robotic applications that rely on the measurements from learned perception modules. We consider a (small) team of quadrotor robots that rely only on an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) and the visual data measurements obtained from a learned multi-task perception module (e.g., object detection) for downstream tasks, including relative localization and coordination. We focus on a class of adversarial perception attacks that cause misclassification, mislocalization, and latency. We propose that the effects of adversarial misclassification and mislocalization can be modeled as sporadic (intermittent) and spurious measurement data for the downstream tasks. To address this, we present a framework for resilience analysis of multi-robot coordination with adversarial measurements. The framework integrates data from Visual-Inertial Odometry (VIO) and the learned perception model for robust relative localization and state estimation in the presence of adversarially sporadic and spurious measurements. The framework allows for quantifying the degradation in system observability and stability in relation to the success rate of adversarial perception. Finally, experimental results on a multi-robot platform demonstrate the real-world applicability of our methodology for resource-constrained robotic platforms.

Distributed Detection of Adversarial Attacks for Resilient Cooperation of Multi-Robot Systems with Intermittent Communication

This paper concerns the consensus and formation of a network of mobile autonomous agents in adversarial settings where a group of malicious (compromised) agents are subject to deception attacks. In addition, the communication network is arbitrarily time-varying and subject to intermittent connections, possibly imposed by denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. We provide explicit bounds for network connectivity in an integral sense, enabling the characterization of the system's resilience to specific classes of adversarial attacks. We also show that under the condition of connectivity in an integral sense uniformly in time, the system is finite-gain $\mathcal{L}_{p}$ stable and uniformly exponentially fast consensus and formation are achievable, provided malicious agents are detected and isolated from the network. We present a distributed and reconfigurable framework with theoretical guarantees for detecting malicious agents, allowing for the resilient cooperation of the remaining cooperative agents. Simulation studies are provided to illustrate the theoretical findings.