18 research outputs found
Time-triggering versus event-triggering control over communication channels
Time-triggered and event-triggered control strategies for stabilization of an
unstable plant over a rate-limited communication channel subject to unknown,
bounded delay are studied and compared. Event triggering carries implicit
information, revealing the state of the plant. However, the delay in the
communication channel causes information loss, as it makes the state
information out of date. There is a critical delay value, when the loss of
information due to the communication delay perfectly compensates the implicit
information carried by the triggering events. This occurs when the maximum
delay equals the inverse of the entropy rate of the plant. In this context,
extensions of our previous results for event triggering strategies are
presented for vector systems and are compared with the data-rate theorem for
time-triggered control, that is extended here to a setting with unknown delay.Comment: To appear in the 56th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC),
Melbourne, Australia. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1609.0959
Learning-based attacks in cyber-physical systems
We introduce the problem of learning-based attacks in a simple abstraction of
cyber-physical systems---the case of a discrete-time, linear, time-invariant
plant that may be subject to an attack that overrides the sensor readings and
the controller actions. The attacker attempts to learn the dynamics of the
plant and subsequently override the controller's actuation signal, to destroy
the plant without being detected. The attacker can feed fictitious sensor
readings to the controller using its estimate of the plant dynamics and mimic
the legitimate plant operation. The controller, on the other hand, is
constantly on the lookout for an attack; once the controller detects an attack,
it immediately shuts the plant off. In the case of scalar plants, we derive an
upper bound on the attacker's deception probability for any measurable control
policy when the attacker uses an arbitrary learning algorithm to estimate the
system dynamics. We then derive lower bounds for the attacker's deception
probability for both scalar and vector plants by assuming a specific
authentication test that inspects the empirical variance of the system
disturbance. We also show how the controller can improve the security of the
system by superimposing a carefully crafted privacy-enhancing signal on top of
the "nominal control policy." Finally, for nonlinear scalar dynamics that
belong to the Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space (RKHS), we investigate the
performance of attacks based on nonlinear Gaussian-processes (GP) learning
algorithms
Exploiting timing information in event-triggered stabilization of linear systems with disturbances
In the same way that subsequent pauses in spoken language are used to convey
information, it is also possible to transmit information in communication
networks not only by message content, but also with its timing. This paper
presents an event-triggering strategy that utilizes timing information by
transmitting in a state-dependent fashion. We consider the stabilization of a
continuous-time, time-invariant, linear plant over a digital communication
channel with bounded delay and subject to bounded plant disturbances and
establish two main results. On the one hand, we design an encoding-decoding
scheme that guarantees a sufficient information transmission rate for
stabilization. On the other hand, we determine a lower bound on the information
transmission rate necessary for stabilization by any control policy
Safe Multi-Agent Interaction through Robust Control Barrier Functions with Learned Uncertainties
Robots operating in real world settings must navigate and maintain safety while interacting with many heterogeneous agents and obstacles. Multi-Agent Control Barrier Functions (CBF) have emerged as a computationally efficient tool to guarantee safety in multi-agent environments, but they assume perfect knowledge of both the robot dynamics and other agents' dynamics. While knowledge of the robot's dynamics might be reasonably well known, the heterogeneity of agents in real-world environments means there will always be considerable uncertainty in our prediction of other agents' dynamics. This work aims to learn high-confidence bounds for these dynamic uncertainties using Matrix-Variate Gaussian Process models, and incorporates them into a robust multi-agent CBF framework. We transform the resulting min-max robust CBF into a quadratic program, which can be efficiently solved in real time. We verify via simulation results that the nominal multi-agent CBF is often violated during agent interactions, whereas our robust formulation maintains safety with a much higher probability and adapts to learned uncertainties
Learning-based Attacks in Cyber-Physical Systems
We introduce the problem of learning-based attacks in an abstraction of cyber-physical systems that may be subject to an attack that overrides the sensor readings and the controller actions. The attacker attempts to learn the dynamics of the plant and subsequently override the controller's actuation signal, to destroy the plant without being detected. The attacker can feed fictitious sensor readings to the controller using its estimate of the plant dynamics and mimic the legitimate plant operation. The controller, on the other hand, is constantly on the lookout for an attack; once the controller detects an attack, it immediately shuts the plant off. We derive lower bounds for the attacker's deception probability for linear plants by assuming a specific authentication test that inspects the empirical variance of the system disturbance. We also show how the controller can improve the security of the system by superimposing a carefully crafted privacy-enhancing signal on top of the control policy. Finally, for nonlinear scalar dynamics that belong to the Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space, we investigate the performance of attacks based on Gaussian-processes regression
Exploiting timing information in event-triggered stabilization of linear systems with disturbances
In the same way that subsequent pauses in spoken language are used to convey information, it is also possible to transmit information in communication networks not only by message content, but also with its timing. This paper presents an event- triggering strategy that utilizes timing information by transmitting in a state-dependent fashion. We consider the stabilization of a continuous-time, time-invariant, linear plant over a digital communication channel with bounded delay and subject to bounded plant disturbances and establish two main results. On the one hand, we design an encoding-decoding scheme that guarantees a sufficient information transmission rate for stabilization. On the other hand, we determine a lower bound on the information transmission rate necessary for stabilization by any control policy