Detection and Inference of Randomness-based Behavior for Resilient Multi-vehicle Coordinated Operations

Abstract: A resilient multi-vehicle system cooperatively performs tasks by exchanging information, detecting, and removing cyber attacks that have the intent of hijacking or diminishing performance of the entire system. In this paper, we propose a framework to: i) detect and isolate misbehaving vehicles in the network, and ii) securely encrypt information among the network to alert and attract nearby vehicles toward points of interest in the environment without explicitly broadcasting safety-critical information. To accomplish these goals, we leverage a decentralized virtual spring-damper mesh physics model for formation control on each vehicle. To discover inconsistent behavior of any vehicle in the network, we consider an approach that monitors for changes in sign behavior of an inter-vehicle residual that does not match with an expectation. Similarly, to disguise important information and trigger vehicles to switch to different behaviors, we leverage side-channel information on the state of the vehicles and characterize a hidden spring-damper signature model detectable by neighbor vehicles. Our framework is demonstrated in simulation and experiments on formations of unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) in the presence of malicious man-in-the-middle communication attacks.