Resilient Path Planning of UAV Formation Flight Against Covert Attacks on Ultra-Wideband Sensors

This article proposes a resilient path planning scheme for the formation flight of the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) swarm against covert attacks. The proposed method optimizes the time and energy consumption while navigating the UAV swarm to achieve the planned formation configuration despite the covert attacks. In particular, each UAV is moving in a three-dimensional space and equipped with a GPS sensor and an Ultra-Wideband (UWB) sensor. The covert attacker can enlarge the formation error of the UAV swarm by simultaneously spoofing the readings of the GPS sensor and corrupting control inputs without being detected by the onboard UWB sensor. To analyze and defend the attacks, we first present the essential prerequisite for the existence of covert attacks. Based on the prerequisite, an optimal covert attack scheme can be derived to maximize the terminal formation error. Correspondingly, a time-critical defense strategy is put forward to depress the above covert attacker. This defense strategy can generate a dynamically feasible polynomial trajectory for each UAV with both security and time efficiency. The effectiveness and practicality of obtained theoretical results are illustrated via two simulation examples.