Coordinated multi-robot planning while preserving individual privacy

We consider the problem of multiple robots that must cooperate within a shared environment, but which wish to limit the information they disclose during their coordination efforts. Specifically, we examine the problems of privacy-preserving rendezvous and persistent monitoring. In the former, the robots construct a joint plan to have them meet, without either knowing beforehand where or when the meeting will occur. In the latter, multiple robots dynamically cover a region of space-they plan collective motions which are collision-free but with the assurance that agents remain ignorant of the paths of others. Accordingly, the tasks are sort of inverses in that the robots must collectively determine whether their joint paths collide or not, then, using this, achieve their collective task. Other than what is learned by the outcome of the joint-collision determination, the robots possess no details of the other paths. Our approach builds on garbled circuits and homomorphic encryption to realize basic secure path intersection primitives. We present algorithms, a software implementation, and a physical experiment on mobile robots to test the practical feasibility of our approach. We believe that these ideas provide a valuable direction for adoption in small Unmanned Systems belonging to different stakeholders.