Secure and Resilient Control of ROSs

A Robot Operating System (ROS) plays a significant role in organizing industrial robots for manufacturing. With an increasing number of robots, operators integrate a ROS with networked communications to share the data. This cyber-physical nature exposes the ROS to cyber attacks. This chapter proposes an integrated cyber-physical solution to secure control of ROS agents using impact-aware lightweight cryptography and cyber-aware control design. We use the cyber states to capture the well-being of the cyber system under the lightweight encryption scheme. To model the incomplete information of the defender on the cyber state, we use a Partially Observed Markov Decision Process (POMDP) to design an impact-aware defense mechanism that makes the ROS resilient to the attacks and mitigates the cyber-physical risks. Finally, we show that the proposed scheme provides a high-confidence control of delay-sensitive ROS in the numerical experiments. The results also show a strong inter-dependency between physical parameters and cyber performance.