Robotics is becoming more and more ubiquitous, but the pressure to bring systems to market occasionally goes at the cost of neglecting security mechanisms during the development, deployment or while in production. As a result, contemporary robotic systems are vulnerable to diverse attack patterns, and an a posteriori hardening is at least challenging, if not impossible at all. This book aims to stipulate the inclusion of security in robotics from the earliest design phases onward and with a special focus on the cost-benefit tradeoff that can otherwise be an inhibitor for the fast development of affordable systems. We advocate quantitative methods of security management and design, covering vulnerability scoring systems tailored to robotic systems, and accounting for the highly distributed nature of robots as an interplay of potentially very many components. A powerful quantitative approach to model-based security is offered by game theory, providing a rich spectrum of techniques to optimize security against various kinds of attacks. Such a multi-perspective view on security is necessary to address the heterogeneity and complexity of robotic systems. This book is intended as an accessible starter for the theoretician and practitioner working in the field.
With the growing popularity of robots, the development of robot applications is subject to an ever increasing number of additional requirements from e.g., safety, legal and ethical sides. The certification of an application for compliance to such requirements is an essential step in the development of a robot program. However, at this point in time it must be ensured that the integrity of this program is preserved meaning that no intentional or unintentional modifications happen to the program until the robot executes it. Based on the abstraction of robot programs as workflows we present in this work a cryptography-powered distributed infrastructure for the preservation of robot workflows. A client composes a robot program and once it is accepted a separate entity provides a digital signature for the workflow and its parameters which can be verified by the robot before executing it. We demonstrate a real-world implementation of this infrastructure using a mobile manipulator and its software stack. We also provide an outlook on the integration of this work into our larger undertaking to provide a distributed ledger-based compliant robot application development environment.
Using the effects of quantum mechanics for computing challenges has been an often discussed topic for decades. The frequent successes and early products in this area, which we have seen in recent years, indicate that we are currently entering a new …
This project aims to increase the public awareness and discussion on robotics. We host different events to get in touch with the public and especially younger generations.
As modern robots become more intelligent, also their use will broaden in public and professional areas. While the aim is to make robots beneficial to humans and society, using those complex machines in complex environments will eventually lead to …
Future robotic systems will be situated in highly networked environments where they communicate with industrial control systems, cloud services or other systems at remote locations. In this trend of strong digitization of industrial systems (also …