Adversarially Robust Coordination for Autonomous Multi-Vehicle Systems

Project started in 2018 and is ongoing.

This project envisions to increase the existing levels of autonomy of networked multi-vehicle systems in adversarial environments by fundamentally considering for the first time both the safety and the resilience aspects of dynamic multi-agent networks.

By safety we mean the generation of guaranteed collision-free trajectories for multiple vehicles (agents) so that they navigate efficiently in cluttered environments while collaborating towards a common task (e.g., data gathering). Multi-agent collaboration in principle requires coordination and negotiation mechanisms among the agents; these mechanisms are implemented using information shared over wireless communication links. However, wireless communication is vulnerable to cyber-attacks. By resilience we mean the guaranteed safe accomplishment of the mission despite the presence of possible adversaries that can send malicious data over compromised communication links.

Our goal is to establish robust (resilient) communication structures for the network, as well as estimation (filtering) and control (coordination/negotiation) mechanisms that will allow the multi-agent network to tolerate or mitigate the adversarial effects of malicious data in the communication structure, while still maintaining safety guarantees.

Prior publications related to this work:

• D. Panagou, D. M. Stipanovic, and P. G. Voulgaris. “Distributed coordination control for multi-robot networks using Lyapunov-like barrier functions”. In: IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control 61.3 (2016), pp. 617–632.
• J. B. Usevitch and D. Panagou. “r-Robustness and (r,s)-Robustness of Circulant Graphs”. In: 56th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, Melbourne, Australia, Dec. 2017.
• D. Han and D. Panagou. “Distributed Multi-task Formation Control under Parametric Communication Uncertainties”. In: Proc. of the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control. Melbourne, Australia, 2017.
• W. Bentz, T. Hoang, E. Bayasgalan, and D. Panagou. “Complete 3-D Dynamic Coverage in Energy-Constrained Multi-UAV Sensor Networks”. In: Autonomous Robots, accepted, to appear.