Quantitative analysis of security in distributed robotic frameworks

Abstract

Robotic software frameworks simplify the development of robotic applications. The more powerful ones help to build such applications as a distributed collection of interoperating software nodes. The communications inside those robotic systems are amenable of being attacked and vulnerable to the security threats present on any networked system. With the robots increasingly entering in people’s daily lives, like autonomous cars, drones, etc. security on them is a central issue gaining attention. This paper studies several well known communication middleware inside robotic frameworks running on robots with regular computers, and their support for cybersecurity. It analyzes their performance when transmitting regular robotic data of different sizes, with or without security features, and on several network settings. The experiments show that security, when available, does not significantly decrease the quality of the robotic data communication in terms of latency and packet loss rate.