Yuan Xu

Yuan Xu, Tianwei Zhang, Yungang Bao

Robot apps are becoming more automated, complex and diverse. An app usually consists of many functions, interacting with each other and the environment. This allows robots to conduct various tasks. However, it also opens a new door for cyber attacks: adversaries can leverage these interactions to threaten the safety of robot operations. Unfortunately, this issue is rarely explored in past works. We present the first systematic investigation about the function interactions in common robot apps. First, we disclose the potential risks and damages caused by malicious interactions. We introduce a comprehensive graph to model the function interactions in robot apps by analyzing 3,100 packages from the Robot Operating System (ROS) platform. From this graph, we identify and categorize three types of interaction risks. Second, we propose RTron, a novel system to detect and mitigate these risks and protect the operations of robot apps. We introduce security policies for each type of risks, and design coordination nodes to enforce the policies and regulate the interactions. We conduct extensive experiments on 110 robot apps from the ROS platform and two complex apps (Baidu Apollo and Autoware) widely adopted in industry. Evaluation results indicated RTron can correctly identify and mitigate all potential risks with negligible performance cost. To validate the practicality of the risks and solutions, we implement and evaluate RTron on a physical UGV (Turtlebot) with real-word apps and environments.

Yuan Xu, Zhiyuan Yan, Sa Wang et al.

This paper envisions a scenario that hundreds of heterogeneous robots form a robotcenter which can be shared by multiple users and used like a single powerful robot to perform complex tasks. However, current multi-robot systems are either unable to manage heterogeneous robots or unable to support multiple concurrent users. Inspired by the design of modern datacenter OSes, we propose Avalon, a robot operating system with two-level scheduling scheme which is widely adopted in datacenters for Internet services and cloud computing. Specifically, Avalon integrates three important features together: (1) Instead of allocating a whole robot, Avalon classifies fine-grained robot resources into three categories to distinguish which fine-grained resources can be shared by multi-robot frameworks simultaneously. (2) Avalon adopts a location based resource allocation policy to substantially reduce scheduling overhead. (3) Avalon enables robots to offload computation intensive tasks to the clouds.We have implemented and evaluated Avalon on robots on both simulated environments and real world.