Inter-device Sensor-Fusion for Action Authorization on Industrial Mobile Robots

Usage of mobile robots in industry increased significantly in recent years. However, mobile robots introduce additional safety issues for human workforce and pose a higher risk of failures in production due to possible abnormal robot behavior. Such abnormal behavior could, among other things, be caused by security weaknesses that entail attacks. These problems lead to a need for action authorization mechanisms to protect humans and mitigate possible costly failures. In this paper, we propose an authorization mechanism for critical actuator actions on industrial mobile robots. The mechanism relies on security principles that prevent adversaries from unauthorized action execution. To the best knowledge of the authors, no similar concept for secured action authorization for industrial mobile robots is currently known in research. Our evaluation shows more than 80% of additional safety hazard causes introduced by the lack of security can be mitigated with the proposed authorization mechanism.