Trust-Based Assured Sensor Fusion in Distributed Aerial Autonomy

Multi-agent collaboration enhances situational awareness in intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) missions. Ad hoc networks of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) allow for real-time data sharing, but they face security challenges due to their decentralized nature, making them vulnerable to cyber-physical attacks. This paper introduces a trust-based framework for assured sensor fusion in distributed multi-agent networks, utilizing a hidden Markov model (HMM)-based approach to estimate the trustworthiness of agents and their provided information in a decentralized fashion. Trust-informed data fusion prioritizes fusing data from reliable sources, enhancing resilience and accuracy in contested environments. To evaluate the assured sensor fusion under attacks on system/mission sensing, we present a novel multi-agent aerial dataset built from the Unreal Engine simulator. We demonstrate through case studies improved ISR performance and an ability to detect malicious actors in adversarial settings.