Intrusion Detection in Swarm Robotics

Student Researcher: Lindsey Coffee-Johnson

Mentor: Dr. Debbie Perouli

Project Description

Several industries, such as healthcare and hospitality, are investigating the benefits of using social and service robots to cover some of their customers' needs. For example, a robot could interact with an older adult to decrease the feeling of loneliness or a robot could deliver items such as food or towels to a hotel guest. Successful deployment of social and service robots will likely lead to the introduction of more robotic units in the facility resulting in the formation of a swarm.

The objective of this project is to develop techniques that detect a hacked robot in the context of a small swarm (three to four robots). The project will focus on two types of abnormal robot behavior:

• The robot's location is different from the location it should have. This type of abnormality includes the robot spending significantly more or less time at a location that it was supposed to visit.
• The robot's psychological impact on the customer is negative.

Milestones and Goals

Week	Description
Week 1: Orientation	Familiarize with Marquette, project and mentor Set milestones and goals for the project duration Start reading related literature on trust in the context of human-robot interaction and intrusion detection
Week 2: Study Related Work	Read related literature with an emphasis on cognitive science topics related to persuasion, deception and manipulation, as well as security in cyber physical systems (CPS) and fault tolerance.
Week 3: Learn About TurtleBots	Learn how to program TurtleBots Explore the Robot Operating System (ROS) and simulator Install and run Python programs developed by Dan Cronce during previous REU project
Week 4: Form Research Hypothesis	Specify assumptions Tasks that each robot will perform (normal behavior) Acts that will constitute proof of hacking (abnormal behavior)
Week 5: Design Methodology to Support or Disprove Hypothesis	Experiments for the part of the project related to hacking the robot's location Comparisons to existing cognitive science studies for the part of the project related to the psychological impact on consumer Give midway presentation
Week 6: Start Writing Paper	Complete the first part of the paper
Week 7: Build System	Build system needed to run the experiments with the TurtleBot 2 robots Collect any additional related work evidence
Week 8: Run Experiments	Run experiments on TurtleBots Detail comparisons of the suggested technique for identifying intrusion detection to existing literature Prepare final poster on research
Week 9: Test hypothesis	If needed, rerun experiments Consider future work
Week 10: Presenting Research	Present at poster session Prepare and give oral presentation Finish and submit final paper