Altering UAV flight path by threatening collision

The ongoing transformation of air traffic control towards a decentralized decision-making system will allow all aircraft, UAS in particular, to automatically detect and resolve collisions. The decision process will use, among others sources, ADS-B information, shared by neighboring traffic. In such distributed systems, trustworthiness among aircraft become of primary importance. In this work we show that autonomous aircraft employing deterministic sense and avoid strategies can be forced into predetermined trajectories when their precise position and velocity are available to a potentially malicious craft. In other words, malicious pursuer players (real or hoaxed) taking advantage of shared data and predictable collision avoidance properties can dictate evader agent trajectory, which might not realize the threat at all. As shown by numerical simulations and ground robot experiments, combination of arcs and straight paths can be achieved and be used to arbitrarily control the evader.