Resilient Path Planning of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Against Covert Attacks on Ultrawideband Sensors

Abstract

In this paper, a resilient path planning scheme is proposed to navigate an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) to its planned (nominal) destination with minimum energy consumption in the presence of a strategic attacker. The UAV is equipped with two sensors, a GPS sensor, which is vulnerable to spoofing attacks, and a well-functioning Ultra-Wideband (UWB) sensor, which is possible to be deceived. It is shown that a covert attacker can significantly deviate the UAV's path without being detected by the UWB sensor by simultaneously corrupting the GPS signals and forging control inputs. The prerequisite for the attack occurrence is first discussed. Based on this prerequisite, an optimal attack scheme is proposed, which maximizes the deviation between the nominal destination and the real one. Correspondingly, an energy-efficient and resilient navigation scheme based on Pontryagin's maximum principle is formulated, which suppresses the above covert attacker effectively. Essentially, this problem can be seen as a Stackelberg game between a resilient path planner (defender) and a covert attacker. The effectiveness of our theoretical results is illustrated via two simulation examples.