Biblio

Existing solutions for scheduling arbitrarily complex distributed applications on networks of computational nodes are insufficient for scenarios where the network topology is changing rapidly. New Internet of Things (IoT) domains like the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) and the Internet of Battlefield Things (IoBT) demand solutions that are robust and efficient in environments that experience constant and/or rapid change. In this paper, we demonstrate how recent advancements in machine learning (in particular, in graph convolutional neural networks) can be leveraged to solve the task scheduling problem with decent performance and in much less time than traditional algorithms.

With the influx of technology use and human-robot teams, it is important to understand how swift trust is developed within these teams. Given this influx, we plan to study how surface cues (i.e., observable characteristics) and imported information (i.e., knowledge from external sources or personal experiences) effect the development of swift trust. We hypothesize that human-like surface level cues and positive imported information will yield higher swift trust. These findings will help the assignment of human robot teams in the future.

Trust is a cognitive ability that can be dependent on behavioral consistency. In this paper, a partially observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP)-based computational robot-human trust model is proposed for hand-over tasks in human-robot collaborative contexts. The robot's trust in its human partner is evaluated based on the human behavior estimates and object detection during the hand-over task. The human-robot hand-over process is parameterized as a partially observable Markov Decision Process. The proposed approach is verified in real-world human-robot collaborative tasks. Results show that our approach can be successfully applied to human-robot hand-over tasks to achieve high efficiency, reduce redundant robot movements, and realize predictability and mutual understanding of the task.

Industry 4.0 is now much more than just a buzzword. However, with the advancement of automation through digitization and softwarization of dedicated hardware, applications are also becoming more susceptible to random hardware errors in the calculation. This cyber-physical demonstrator uses a robotic application to show the effects that even single bit flips can have in the real world due to hardware errors. Using the graphical user interface including the human machine interface, the audience can generate hardware errors in the form of bit flips and see their effects live on the robot. In this paper we will be showing a new technology, the SIListra Safety Transformer (SST), that makes it possible to detect those kind of random hardware errors, which can subsequently make safety-critical applications more reliable.

Autonomous robots are increasingly widespread in our society. These robots need to be safe, reliable, respectful of privacy, not manipulable by external agents, and capable of offering explanations of their behavior in order to be accountable and acceptable in our societies. Companies offering robotic services will need to provide mechanisms to address these issues using High Performance Computing (HPC) facilities, where logs and off-line forensic analysis could be addressed if required, but these solutions are still not available in software development frameworks for robots. The aim of this paper is to discuss the implications and interactions among cybersecurity, safety, and explainability with the goal of making autonomous robots more trustworthy.

Robotic systems are becoming an ever-increasing part of everyday life due to their capacity to carry out physical tasks on behalf of human beings. Found in nearly every facet of our lives, robotic systems are used domestically, in small and large-scale factories, for the production and processing of agriculture, for military operations, to name a few. The Robotic Operating System (ROS) is the standard operating system used today for the development of modular robotic systems. However, in its development, ROS has been notorious for the absence of security mechanisms, placing people in danger both physically and digitally. This dissertation summary presents the development of a suite of ROS tools, leading up to the development of a modular, secure framework for ROS. An integrated approach for the security of ROS-enabled robotic systems is described, to set a baseline for the continual development to increase ROS security. The work culminates in the ROS security tool ROS-Immunity, combining internal system defense, external system verification, and automated vulnerability detection in an integrated tool that, in conjunction with Secure-ROS, provides a suite of defenses for ROS systems against malicious attackers.

The trust of a robot in its human partner is a significant issue in human-robot interaction, which is seldom explored in the field of robotics. This study addresses a critical issue of robots' trust in humans during the human-robot collaboration process based on the data of human motions, past interactions of the human-robot pair, and the human's current performance in the co-carry task. The trust level is evaluated dynamically throughout the collaborative task that allows the trust level to change if the human performs false positive actions, which can help the robot avoid making unpredictable movements and causing injury to the human. Experimental results showed that the robot effectively assisted the human in collaborative tasks through the proposed computational trust model.

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) often rely on network boundary defence as a primary means of access control; therefore, the compromise of one device threatens the security of all devices within the boundary. Resource and real-time constraints, tight hardware/software coupling, and decades-long service lifetimes complicate efforts for more robust, host-based access control mechanisms. Distributed capability systems provide opportunities for restoring access control to resource-owning devices; however, such a protection model requires a capability-based architecture for CPS devices as well as task compartmentalisation to be effective.This paper demonstrates hardware enforcement of network bearer tokens using an efficient translation between CHERI (Capability Hardware Enhanced RISC Instructions) architectural capabilities and Macaroon network tokens. While this method appears to generalise to any network-based access control problem, we specifically consider CPS, as our method is well-suited for controlling resources in the physical domain. We demonstrate the method in a distributed robotics application and in a hierarchical industrial control application, and discuss our plans to evaluate and extend the method.

Robots are networks of a variety of computing devices, such as powerful computing platforms but also tiny microcontrollers. The Robot Operating System (ROS) is the dominant framework for powerful computing devices. While ROS version 2 adds important features like quality of service and security, it cannot be directly applied to microcontrollers because of its large memory footprint. The micro-ROS project has ported the ROS 2 API to microcontrollers. However, the standard ROS 2 concepts are not enough for real-time performance: In the ROS 2 release “Foxy”, the standard ROS 2 Executor, which is the central component responsible for handling timers and incoming message data, is neither real-time capable nor deterministic. Domain-specific requirements of mobile robots, like sense-plan-act control loops, cannot be addressed with the standard ROS 2 Executor. In this paper, we present an advanced Executor for the ROS 2 C API which provides deterministic scheduling and supports domain-specific requirements. A proof-of-concept is demonstrated on a 32-bit microcontroller.

Robotic Operating System(ROS) security research is currently in a preliminary state, with limited research in tools or models. Considering the trend of digitization of robotic systems, this lack of foundational knowledge increases the potential threat posed by security vulnerabilities in ROS. In this article, we present a new tool to assist further security research in ROS, ROSploit. ROSploit is a modular two-pronged offensive tool covering both reconnaissance and exploitation of ROS systems, designed to assist researchers in testing exploits for ROS.

Robots are becoming more and more prevalent in many real world scenarios. Housekeeping, medical aid, human assistance are a few common implementations of robots. Military and Security are also major areas where robotics is being researched and implemented. Robots with the purpose of surveillance in war zones and terrorist scenarios need specific functionalities to perform their tasks with precision and efficiency. In this paper, we present a model of Military Surveillance Robot developed using Robot Operating System. The map generation based on Kinect sensor is presented and some test case scenarios are discussed with results.

With recent advances in robotics, it is expected that robots will become increasingly common in human environments, such as in the home and workplaces. Robots will assist and collaborate with humans on a variety of tasks. During these collaborations, it is inevitable that disagreements in decisions would occur between humans and robots. Among factors that lead to which decision a human should ultimately follow, theirs or the robot, trust is a critical factor to consider. This study aims to investigate individuals' behaviors and aspects of trust in a problem-solving situation in which a decision must be made in a bounded amount of time. A between-subject experiment was conducted with 100 participants. With the assistance of a humanoid robot, participants were requested to tackle a cognitive-based task within a given time frame. Each participant was randomly assigned to one of the following initial conditions: 1) a working robot in which the robot provided a correct answer or 2) a faulty robot in which the robot provided an incorrect answer. Impacts of the faulty robot behavior on participant's decision to follow the robot's suggested answer were analyzed. Survey responses about trust were collected after interacting with the robot. Results indicated that the first impression has a significant impact on participant's behavior of trusting a robot's advice during a disagreement. In addition, this study discovered evidence supporting that individuals still have trust in a malfunctioning robot even after they have observed a robot's faulty behavior.

The safety of critical cyber-physical IoT devices hinges on the security of their embedded software that implements control algorithms for monitoring and control of the associated physical processes, e.g., robotics and drones. Reverse engineering of the corresponding embedded controller software binaries enables their security analysis by extracting high-level, domain-specific, and cyber-physical execution semantic information from executables. We present MISMO, a domain-specific reverse engineering framework for embedded binary code in emerging cyber-physical IoT control application domains. The reverse engineering outcomes can be used for firmware vulnerability assessment, memory forensics analysis, targeted memory data attacks, or binary patching for dynamic selective memory protection (e.g., important control algorithm parameters). MISMO performs semantic-matching at an algorithmic level that can help with the understanding of any possible cyber-physical security flaws. MISMO compares low-level binary symbolic values and high-level algorithmic expressions to extract domain-specific semantic information for the binary's code and data. MISMO enables a finer-grained understanding of the controller by identifying the specific control and state estimation algorithms used. We evaluated MISMO on 2,263 popular firmware binaries by 30 commercial vendors from 6 application domains including drones, self-driving cars, smart homes, robotics, 3D printers, and the Linux kernel controllers. The results show that MISMO can accurately extract the algorithm-level semantics of the embedded binary code and data regions. We discovered a zero-day vulnerability in the Linux kernel controllers versions 3.13 and above.

This article presents the valuable experience and practical results of exploratory research by authors on the scientific problem of cyber-resilient (Cyber Resilience) critical information infrastructure in the previously unknown heterogeneous mass cyber attacks of attackers based on similarity invariants. It is essential that the results obtained significantly complement the well-known practices and recommendations of ISO 22301 (https://www.iso.org), MITER PR 15-1334 (www.mitre.org) and NIST SP 800-160 (www.nist.gov) in terms of developing quantitative metrics and cyber resistance measures. This allows you to open and formally present the ultimate law of the effectiveness of ensuring the cyber stability of modern systems of Industry 4.0. in the face of growing security threats.

In this paper we propose ROS-Defender, a holistic approach to secure robotics systems, which integrates a Security Event Management System (SIEM), an intrusion prevention system (IPS) and a firewall for a robotic system. ROS-Defender combines anomaly detection systems at application (ROS) level and network level, with dynamic policy enforcement points using software defined networking (SDN) to provide protection against a large class of attacks. Although SIEMs, IPS, and firewall have been previously used to secure computer networks, ROSDefender is applying them for the specific use case of robotic systems, where security is in many cases an afterthought.

So-called IoT, based on use of enabling technologies like 5G, Wi-Fi, BT, NFC, RFID, IPv6 as well as being widely applied for sensor networks, robots, Wearable and Cyber-PHY, invades rapidly to our every day. There are a lot of apps and software platforms to IoT support. However, a most important problem of QoS optimization, which lays in Performance, Reliability and Scalability for IoT, is not yet solved. The extended Internet of the future needs these solutions based on the cooperation between fog and clouds with delegating of the analytics blocks via agents, adaptive interfaces and protocols. The next problem is as follows: IoT can generate large arrays of unmanaged, weakly-structured, and non-configured data of various types, known as "Big Data". The given papers deals with the both problems. A special problem is Security and Privacy in potentially "dangerous" IoTscenarios. Anyway, this subject needs as special discussion for risks evaluation and cooperative intrusion detection. Some advanced approaches for optimization of Performance, Reliability and Scalability for IoT-solutions are offered within the paper. The paper discusses the Best Practises and Case Studies aimed to solution of the established problems.

The field of robotics has matured using artificial intelligence and machine learning such that intelligent robots are being developed in the form of autonomous vehicles. The anticipated widespread use of intelligent robots and their potential to do harm has raised interest in their security. This research evaluates a cyberattack on the machine learning policy of an autonomous vehicle by designing and attacking a robotic vehicle operating in a dynamic environment. The primary contribution of this research is an initial assessment of effective manipulation through an indirect attack on a robotic vehicle using the Q learning algorithm for real-time routing control. Secondly, the research highlights the effectiveness of this attack along with relevant artifact issues.

Conducted emission of motors is a domain of interest for EMC as it may introduce disturbances in the system in which they are integrated. Nevertheless few publications deal with the susceptibility of motors, and especially, servomotors despite this devices are more and more used in automated production lines as well as for robotics. Recent papers have been released devoted to the possibility of compromising such systems by cyber-attacks. One could imagine the use of smart intentional electromagnetic interference to modify their behavior or damage them leading in the modification of the industrial process. This paper aims to identify the disturbances that may affect the behavior of a Commercial Off-The-Shelf servomotor when exposed to an electromagnetic field and the criticality of the effects with regards to its application. Experiments have shown that a train of radio frequency pulses may induce an erroneous reading of the position value of the servomotor and modify in an unpredictable way the movement of the motor's axis.

Anthropomorphic artificial agents, computed characters or humanoid robots, can be sued to investigate human cognition. They are intrinsically ambivalent. They appear and act as humans, hence we should tend to consider them as human, yet we know they are machine designed by humans, and should not consider them as humans. Reviewing a number of behavioral and neurophysiological studies provides insights into social mechanisms that are primarily influenced by the appearance of the agent, and in particular its resemblance to humans, and other mechanisms that are influenced by the knowledge we have about the artificial nature of the agent. A significant finding is that, as expected, humans don't naturally adopt an intentional stance when interacting with artificial agents.

Offloading computationally expensive Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) task for mobile robots have attracted significant attention during the last few years. Lack of powerful on-board compute capability in these energy constrained mobile robots and rapid advancement in compute cloud access technologies laid the foundation for development of several Cloud Robotics platforms that enabled parallel execution of computationally expensive robotic algorithms, especially involving multiple robots. In this work the Cloud Robotics concept is extended to include the current emphasis of computing at the network edge nodes along with the Cloud. The requirements and advantages of using edge nodes for computation offloading over remote cloud or local robot clusters are discussed with reference to the ETSI 'Mobile-Edge Computing' initiative and OpenFog Consortium's 'OpenFog Architecture'. A Particle Filter algorithm for SLAM is modified and implemented for offloading in a multi-tier edge+cloud setup. Additionally a model is proposed for offloading decision in such a setup with experiments and results demonstrating the efficacy of the proposed dynamic offloading scheme over static offloading strategies.