A Bio-Inspired Cybersecurity Scheme to Protect a Swarm of Robots

Swarm robotics describes a multi-robot system characterized by the simplicity of its agents, homogeneous architecture, limited communication skills, local detection, execution of parallel tasks, robustness, scalability, flexibility and decentralized control. However, being a technology in development, the security and vulnerability of the swarm of robots against possible cybernetic attacks have been commonly overlooked. This is of major concern when executing mission-critical activities that inherently require an adequate management of security. In this work, a bio-inspired security mechanism applied to a swarm of robots is proposed. Through computer simulations, it is observed how the mechanism, when executing a homing towards a stationary landmark, allows the swarm of robots to identify abnormal behaviors, caused by a certain cyberattack; subsequently, it establishes a certain tolerance to it and allows to improve the level of availability that is required to continue executing the task at hand.