A Macroscopic Privacy Model for Heterogeneous Robot Swarms

To date, the issues of privacy and security remain poorly addressed within robotics at large. In this work, we provide a foundation for analyzing the privacy of swarms of heterogeneous robots. Our premise is that information pertaining to individual robot types must be kept private in order to preserve the security and resilience of the swarm system at large. A main contribution is the development of a macroscopic privacy model that can be applied to swarms. Our privacy model draws from the notion of differential privacy that stems from the database literature, and that provides a stringent statistical interpretation of information leakage. We combine the privacy model with a macroscopic abstraction of the swarm system, and show how this enables an analysis of the privacy trends as swarm parameters vary.