Research Projects

The resilience of vehicular swarms to malicious attacks is an important issue in the field of autonomous vehicles and intelligent transportation systems. Malicious attacks can disrupt the operation of vehicular swarms, causing safety issues leading to loss of lives and property. Therefore, it is essential to develop robust control approaches that can detect and mitigate the effects of malicious attacks. Apart from addressing malicious attacks, the robust controller can also handle modelling uncertainties in the vehicles themselves, that arise from undermodelling of the vehicular dynamics. This undermodelling becomes inevitable when considering swarms of rotorcrafts and fixed wing unmanned air vehicles (UAVs), as considered in this project, whose nonlinear dynamics may be intractable for analysis and synthesis. One approach to achieving resilience in vehicular swarms is through the use of robust control techniques, that are designed to ensure that a system remains stable and performs adequately, even in the presence of uncertainties and disturbances. This makes them suitable for addressing the effects of malicious attacks, which can introduce uncertainties and disturbances in the operation of vehicular swarms. Examples of robust control approaches that can enhance the resilience of vehicular swarms are H-infinity or H-2 optimal control techniques. H-infinity control is a design technique that seeks to minimize the effects of disturbances and uncertainties on a system's performance. It can be used to design a controller that is robust to a wide range of disturbances and uncertainties, including those introduced by malicious attacks. In the case of vehicular swarms, for instance, such techniques can be used to maintain a desired formation shape and speed of the swarm, even in the presence of malicious attacks. The designed controller can guard against a malicious attack and adjust the system's control inputs suitably. For example, if a malicious attacker attempts to disrupt the formation leading to deviations from their intended trajectories, the robust controller can adjust the control inputs of the affected vehicles to bring them back to their intended positions. In conclusion, the resilience of vehicular swarms to malicious attacks can be enhanced through the use of robust control approaches. Approaches, such as H-2 and H-infinity control or, more generally, dissipativity based controllers, can detect the presence of malicious attacks and adjust the system's control inputs to mitigate their effects. In this project, the proposed robust controllers will be tested on actual swarms of heterogeneous autonomous vehicles such as ground vehicles, rotorcrafts, and fixed wing UAVs. As the field of autonomous vehicles and intelligent transportation systems continues to evolve, it will be essential to develop and apply robust control approaches to ensure the safety and security of vehicular swarms, both for military and civilian applications.