Security in Swarm Robotics

Inspired by social animals, such as ants, bees and fish, which appear to exhibit what has been dubbed ‘swarm intelligence’, swarm robotic systems aim to accomplish goals that are unachievable by an individual robot. Swarm robotics have a large number of potential uses, including applications in the military, monitoring, disaster relief, healthcare and commercial applications. To be able to achieve their goals, it is of utmost importance that communications between agents are secure in the presence of possibly malicious interruptions and attacks from adversaries. The authors will discuss the issues surrounding the provision of secure communications in swarm robotics: what secure communications mean, how the characteristics of swarm robotics present a security challenge, the relationship between security issues for swarm robotics and other network technologies, and how different adversarial models demand different types of solutions. It will then be discussed what the important open research questions are in secure communications in swarm robotics.