Passivity-Based Connectivity Maintenance of Teleoperated Multi-Robots Under DoS Attacks

Teleoperated multi-robots rely on communications, both between the human’s local robot and the multiple remote robots and among the remote robots themselves, to execute the remote tasks commanded by their human operator. If attacked, the communications may lead to task failure, loss of multi-robot connectivity and possibly unstable teleoperation. To render teleoperated multi-robots resilient to Denial of Service (DoS) attacks with arbitrary frequency and duration, this paper augments a passivity-based controller for normal teleoperation with: 1) a controller that stops the remote robots at safe distances from each other and from obstacles when a DoS attack starts; and 2) a controller that restores the multi-robot connectivity before resuming normal teleoperation when a DoS attack stops. The teleoperation of a simulated multi-robot system with one leader and two followers illustrates the effectiveness of the proposed distributed control strategy. <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Note to Practitioners</i> —Research and industry increasingly seek to use robots in inaccessible unstructured environments Teleoperated multi-robots are ideally suited for such environments because they fuse human cognition with remote multi-robotic execution. However, they can be hindered by cyber attacks on their communications. As cyber attacks become more prevalent, resilience to them becomes increasingly important for practical teleoperated multi-robots. This paper presents a first distributed control strategy for rendering teleoperated multi-robots resilient to DoS attacks. For industrial practitioners, the proposed strategy has two key advantages: 1) it is straightforward to implement; and 2) it is effective for DoS attacks with arbitrary frequency and duration. Future work will tackle teleoperated multi-robots under malicious attacks.