Attacks on Formation Control for Multiagent Systems

Multiagent systems (MASs) are distributed systems with two or more intelligent agents. Formation control is a significant control technique of MASs. To date, formation control on MASs is widely used in various fields, such as robots, spacecrafts, satellites, and unmanned aerial/surface/underwater vehicles. However, there is a relatively small body of literature that is concerned with security problems of formation control on MASs in past years. Our research represents the first step toward developing security attacks of formation control on MASs. Our study aims to investigate potential security problems of formation control on a multirobot system for the first time. We propose two kinds of control-level attacks and each kind of attack includes several specific attack forms. Then, we discuss specific features of formation control on a classical multirobot system and utilize theoretical analyses to illustrate how cyberattacks can influence the physical movements of robots. The experimental results of the proposed attacks show that attacks can easily interrupt formation movements of a multirobot system and several carefully designed attacks even can cause irreversible loss.

I. Introduction

In the last few decades, there has been a surge of interest in the development of various multiagent systems (MASs) [1], [2]. MASs are distributed systems with two or more intelligent agents [3]. In contrast to a single agent, agents in MASs can cooperatively solve complicated problems with good efficiency, robustness, and reliability.