Securing multi-robot teams against malicious activity is crucial as these systems accelerate towards widespread societal integration. This emerging class of “physical networks” requires research into new methods of security that exploit their physical nature. This paper derives a theoretical framework for securing multi-agent consensus against the Sybil attack by using the physical properties of wireless transmissions. Our frame-work uses information extracted from the wireless channels to design a switching signal that stochastically excludes potentially untrustworthy transmissions from the consensus. Intuitively, this amounts to selectively ignoring incoming communications from untrustworthy agents, allowing for consensus to the true average to be recovered with high probability if initiated after a certain observation time T0that we derive. This work is different from previous work in that it allows for arbitrary malicious node values and is insensitive to the initial topology of the network so long as a connected topology over legitimate nodes in the network is feasible. We show that our algorithm will recover consensus and the true graph over the system of legitimate agents with an error rate that vanishes exponentially with time.

Distributed real time applications have presented the need to extend the Object Management Group's (OMG) Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) standard to support real time. The OMG has formed a real time special interest group (RT SIG) to specify requirements for extending CORBA for real time. One of these requirements involves providing global scheduling of all executions to support end to end timing constraints in the real time CORBA system. The paper describes the design and implementation of a real time scheduling service for a Dynamic Real Time CORBA system.

We give an overview of ongoing development efforts and supporting research which is evolving the United States Air Force's Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS). AWACS is an airplane-based sensor and command and control platform with an on-board mission computing system that presents operators with sensor and other information subject to real-time quality of service requirements. The legacy mission computing system is mainframe-based and relies on a centralized, cyclic scheduling approach which makes maintenance and improvement very difficult. We briefly discuss interesting aspects of our efforts to upgrade this system to use emerging real-time distributed object technology, object management, and modern scheduling and schedulability analysis. Advance demonstrations of this upgrade have been very successful, and test flights should be underway at the time of the conference. Within this context, we give examples of technology transfer.

MITRE's Evolvable Real-Time Command Control, and Communications (C3) project, funded under the Air Force Mission Oriented Investigation and Experimentation (MOIE) program attempts to develop an approach that would enable current real-time systems to evolve into the systems of the future. The project has chosen the Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) as an example to test the concepts and architectures to be developed. We discuss the requirements for the infrastructure for next generation complex real-time command and control systems. This discussion also includes an overview of the infrastructure requirements for each of the three architectures that we have considered.