Building Secure Robot Applications

This position paper recognizes that general purpose robots will become increasingly common and argues that we need to prepare ourselves to deal with security for robot applications in an intelligent way. We discuss ways that robots are similar to traditional computing devices and ways that robots are different, and we describe the challenges that arise. We propose a framework for providing security for robot applications and we discuss three potential robot applications: a “fetch coffee” app, a “pretend to be a Labrador” app, and a “is my advisor in his office and available” app. We discuss some of the security needs of these applications and propose a few potential ways to address those security needs.