F R O M T H E
G U E S T E D I T O R S
State-of-the-Art in Robot Authentication Marina L. Gavrilova (
[email protected]), University of Calgary, and Roman V. Yampolskiy (
[email protected])
T
his special issue on robot authentication presents a collection of state-of-the-art articles reporting on the unique aspects of secure authentication in robotics. The issue concentrates specifically on automatic identification of artificial entities (robots, bots, and avatars) and the complementary problem of human recognition by such artificial agents. There are numerous recent advancements in all aspects of the development and deployment of advanced domestic and industrial robots as well as artificial entities, such as intelligent software agents and avatars. These developments have in turn led to advanced research on program recognition, robot behavior recognition, robot behavior prediction, robot detection, and robot self-recognition, as well as attempts to use biometric research for avatar and robot synthesis. This special issue addresses a natural question of an automatic, fast, secure, and accurate identification of artificial entities via contributions from robotics, as well as from biometrics, security, artificial intelligence, pattern recognition, cognitive science, and virtual reality fields. Domestic and industrial robots, intelligent software agents, virtual world avatars, and other artificial entities are quickly becoming a part of our everyday life. Just like it is necessary to be able to accurately authenticate identity of human beings, it is becoming essential to be able to determine the identity of the nonbiological entities rapidly infiltrating all aspects of modern society. Robotic museum guides, software office assistants, humanlike biped robots, office robots, domestic and industrial androids, bots, virtual-world avatars, military robots, and thousands of other man-made entities all have something in common: a pressing need for a decentralized, affordable, automatic, fast, secure, reliable, and accurate means of identity authentication. To address these concerns, the concept of artimetrics—a field of study that will allow identification, classification, and authentication of robots, software, and virtual reality agents— was recently introduced by the editors of this special issue. As research progresses, there is increasing evidence that the developed prototypes of the robots of tomorrow tend to resemble humans and possess abilities of a human being, including capacity to walk, speak, type, make decisions, and interact in the real and virtual world. It is also likely that robot owners might choose to customize their robot’s appearance, just like people frequently elect to customize their cell phones or computers, resulting in robots to be truly unique in appearance. The feature that naturally lends itself to customization is the
face of a robot; in fact, celebrity look-alike and model robots have already appeared. Thus, the need arises to ensure that there is no security threat to people, property, and cyberinfrastructure—a goal achievable through a variety of newly introduced methodologies and techniques. A promising new direction of research is to extend current cognitive informatics and biometrics research focusing on humans to a new generation of research algorithms for recognition of software and hardware robots. Recently, there have been significant increases in a variety of biometric methods— utilizing learning approaches (i.e., AdaBoost), advanced image analysis [principal component analysis (PCA) and derivatives], geometric pattern recognition (Voronoi diagram-based matching), and information fusion (rank, decision, and match score level)—that can fairly successfully recognize human identities. New research in the area of robots recognizing humans uses the
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MRA.2010.938838
DECEMBER 2010
IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine
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Seeing should not imply believing in the world of telepresent communication. set of biometric methods for motion, face, gesture, gait, and voice identification. However, with the help of advanced technology, another area appears on the rise that looks into how computer programs, bots, robots, and avatars could be detected, identified, and behaviorally profiled by humans. Examples of situations where such recognition might provide to be crucial include an unauthorized intelligent bot participating illegally in an online game and pretending to be a real human, a military autonomous device with a hacked control system, or a human assistant robot that has been malfunctioning and could become dangerous as a result. While the theoretical contributions on the subject are of importance, it is the practical application of the results to realworld problems, as well as emerging areas of computer science, that are key aspects of this special issue. The four carefully selected contributions comprising this special issue are connected by a common theme: the application of recent methodological advances to important robotics security-related problems. Each of the contributions also find a unique niche in the spectrum of the current research, presenting a new look into the society of robots and emerging security issues, investigating authentication problems at the age of increased avatar realism, presenting a new method for visual robot detection, and introducing an intelligent behavioral model of cognitive robots. The first article “Toward a Society of Robots: Behaviors, Misbehaviors, and Security” by Antonio Bicchi, Adriano Fagiolini, and Lucia Pallottino presents a number of new approaches to improve the overall security of the society of robots. It first considers how very large numbers of robots, differing in their bodies, sensing, and intelligence, may coexist, communicate, and compete fairly toward achieving their individual goals. Then the authors discuss some characteristics that the rules defining acceptable social behaviors of robots should possess, as well as possible threats that may be posed by the misbehaviors of some of its robot members. The cause of such misbehavior could be due to faults or malice, and thus, the task to detect and isolate such members should be carried out through cooperation of peers. The article presents examples of motion control protocols for arbitrarily large groups of heterogeneous robots. In particular, some intrusion detection algorithms, which allow detection of deviance from society rules as well as algorithms to build a consensus view on the environment and on the integrity of peers, are introduced. Many examples support the proposed approach aimed to improve the overall security of the society of robots. “The Age of Avatar Realism: When Seeing Shouldn’t Be Believing” by Laurel D. Riek and Robert N.M. Watson explores a challenging problem of trust that seems natural 24
IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine
to users of video teleconferencing and robot telepresence. Authors postulate that recent advances in affect recognition, facial expression synthesis, and speech synthesis are giving nonexperts access to tools for performing live manipulation of audio and video streams, as well as control signals for telepresence robots. This, in turn, presents certain security risks, which regular users might be unaware or unfamiliar with. Riek and Watson then apply the vocabulary of security protocol analysis to this new environment, considering how changes in technology call into question assumptions of trust. Increasingly, seeing should not imply believing in the world of telepresent communication, and the authors argue for strong measures to protect the security of the channels, including reinforcing traditional security areas (platform and channel security), and ensuring that proper security protocols are used wherever they are appropriate. “Play Ball!: Robot Detection System in the Soccer Domain” by J. Ruiz-del-Solar, R. Verschae, M. Arenas, and P. Loncomilla addresses the problem of automatic detection and identification of robots, as well as the recognition of their behavioral patterns. Collaborative robot behaviors in multirobot systems are becoming highly important in scientific and industrial application areas, such as ground, space, and underwater exploration, entertainment, surveillance, human assistance, and autonomous rescue operations. A complex variety of interactions arises among different robots as well as between them and humans. Thus, the authors argue that it is highly important to develop automatic, fast, and accurate methods for the detection and identification of robots, as well as the determination of their behaviors. To address this challenge, the authors present a new multiclass and multiview robot detection system based on the trees of cascades classifiers. The successful application of the proposed methodology in a robotic soccer application showcases its strengths. The final article of the special issue, “Cognitive Robots: A Reference Model Toward Intelligent Authentication” by Yingxu Wang, introduces an emerging technology of cognitive robots to model the cognitive processes of robot authentication. Fundamental problems remaining in cognitive robot studies include defining the necessary and sufficient intelligent behaviors of cognitive robots as well as distinguishing the intelligent capabilities of cognitive robots from those of their imperative counterparts. Wang presents a cognitive reference model of architectures and behaviors of cognitive robots. He explores cognitive informatics foundations of cognitive robots from the aspects of neural informatics and abstract intelligence. The architectural model of cognitive robots is described based on a layered reference model of the brain. The behavioral model of cognitive robot is elaborated with the generic behavioral model and the hierarchical relations among the behavioral processes of cognitive robots. Finally, a reference model of cognitive robots is derived. Wang concludes with applications of the reference model in robot authentication, computational intelligence, and automation systems. DECEMBER 2010
