Teams of robots tasked with making critical decisions in competitive environments are at risk for being shepherded or misdirected to a location that is advantageous for a competing team. Our lab is working to understand how adversarial teams of robots can successfully move their competition to desired locations in part so that we can then devise practices to counter these strategies and help make team functioning more successful and secure. In this paper, preliminary research is presented that studies how a team of robots can be shepherded or misdirected to a disadvantageous location. We draw inspiration from herding practices as well as deceptive practices seen in higher-order primates and humans. We define behaviors for the target (mark) agents to be moved as well as members of the shepherding team (a pushing agent and pulling shills) and present simulation results showing how these behaviors move robots to a desired location. These behaviors were implemented and trialed on hardware platform. A discussion of ongoing research into understanding misdirection in multi-robot teams concludes this paper.
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Misdirection in Robot Teams: Methods and Ethical Considerations
Trust, dependability, cohesion, and capability are integral to an effective team. These attributes are the same for teams of robots. When multiple teams with competing incentives are tasked, a strategy, if available, may be to weaken, influence or sway the attributes of other teams and limit their understanding of their full range of options. Such strategies are widely found in nature and in sporting contests such as feints, misdirection, etc. This talk focuses on one class of higher-level strategies for multi-robots, i.e., to intentionally misdirect using shills or confederates where needed, and the ethical considerations associated with deploying such teams. As multi-robot
systems become more autonomous, distributed, networked, numerous, and with more capability to make critical decisions, the prospect for intentional and unintentional misdirection must be anticipated. While benefits are clearly apparent to the team performing the deception, ethical questions surrounding the use of misdirection or other forms of deception are quite real.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1848653
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10098534
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2019 International Association for Computing and Philosophy annual conference
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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