Opponent-Aware Planning with Admissible Privacy Preserving for UGV Security Patrol under Contested Environment

Abstract

Unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) have been widely used in security patrol. The existence of two potential opponents, the malicious teammate (cooperative) and the hostile observer (adversarial), highlights the importance of privacy-preserving planning under contested environments. In a cooperative setting, the disclosure of private information can be restricted to the malicious teammates. In adversarial setting, obfuscation can be added to control the observability of the adversarial observer. In this paper, we attempt to generate opponent-aware privacy-preserving plans, mainly focusing on two questions: what is opponent-aware privacy-preserving planning, and, how can we generate opponent-aware privacy-preserving plans? We first define the opponent-aware privacy-preserving planning problem, where the generated plans preserve admissible privacy. Then, we demonstrate how to generate opponent-aware privacy-preserving plans. The search-based planning algorithms were restricted to public information shared among the cooperators. The observation of the adversarial observer could be purposefully controlled by exploiting decoy goals and diverse paths. Finally, we model the security patrol problem, where the UGV restricts information sharing and attempts to obfuscate the goal. The simulation experiments with privacy leakage analysis and an indoor robot demonstration show the applicability of our proposed approaches.