Manipulating Neural Path Planners via Slight Perturbations

Data-driven neural path planners are attracting increasing interest in the robotics community. However, their neural network components typically come as black boxes, obscuring their underlying decision-making processes. Their black-box nature exposes them to the risk of being compromised via the insertion of hidden malicious behaviors. For example, an attacker may hide behaviors that, when triggered, hijack a delivery robot by guiding it to a specific (albeit wrong) destination, trapping it in a predefined region, or inducing unnecessary energy expenditure by causing the robot to repeatedly circle a region. In this letter, we propose a novel approach to specify and inject a range of hidden malicious behaviors, known as backdoors, into neural path planners. Our approach provides a concise but flexible way to define these behaviors, and we show that hidden behaviors can be triggered by slight perturbations (e.g., inserting a tiny unnoticeable object), that can nonetheless significantly compromise their integrity. We also discuss potential techniques to identify these backdoors aimed at alleviating such risks. We demonstrate our approach on both sampling-based and search-based neural path planners.