DRIFT: Resilient Distributed Coordinated Fleet Management Against Communication Attacks

Consider a fleet of autonomous vehicles traversing an adversarial terrain that includes obstacles and mines. The goal of the fleet is to ensure that they can complete their mission safely (with minimal casualty) and efficiently (as quickly as possible). In Distributed Coordinated Fleet Management (DCFM), fleet members coordinate with one another while traversing the terrain, e.g., a vehicle encountering an obstacle at a location l can inform other agents so that they can recompute their route to avoid l. In this paper, we consider the problem of cyber-resilient DCFM, i.e., DCFM in an environment where the adversary can additionally tamper with the cyber-communication performed by the fleet members. Our framework, DRiFt, enables fleet members to coordinate in the presence of such adversaries. Our extensive evaluations demonstrate that DRiFt can achieve a high degree of safety and efficiency against a large spectrum of communication adversaries.