Robotic Security: A Dual-Domain Analysis of Security Robots and Robot Cybersecurity

Robotic security operates across two distinct but increasingly converging domains: the deployment of robots as security agents (security robotics) and the protection of robotic systems from cyber-physical attacks (robot cybersecurity). This paper provides a structured examination of both domains. In the first, security robots—including patrol robots, sentry systems, and autonomous surveillance platforms—are analyzed in terms of their applications, capabilities, and the human–robot interaction challenges they pose. In the second, the unique vulnerabilities of robotic systems are examined, including threats to sensors, actuators, communication channels, and the Robot Operating System (ROS) ecosystem, alongside emerging defense mechanisms such as intrusion detection systems and secure-by-design architectures. We complement the review with an empiricalcomponent: a structured survey of N = 48 security-robot deployments, a simulated evaluation of an intrusion-detection pipeline on robotic network traffic collected from a ROS 2 testbed, and asecondary analysis of published human–robot trust data. Results indicate that (i) fewer than one infive deployed security robots incorporate any documented cyber-hardening, and hardening isstatistically decoupled from network exposure; (ii) a univariate-feature-selection IDS retains 99.3% of baseline macro-F1 while reducing feature dimensionality by 74.4% and halving edge inference latency; and (iii) perceived trust in a security robot is predicted more strongly by perceived integrity than by perceived ability. The paper argues that the increasing autonomy and connectivity ofsecurity robots creates a recursive vulnerability: the very systems deployed to provide securitybecome attractive targets for adversarial compromise. A unified perspective that treats roboticsecurity as a cyber-physical problem—rather than two separate fields—is necessary for the safe and trustworthy deployment of security robotics.