Systems of autonomous vehicles under cooperative control provide versatile platforms for a variety of tasks including environmental monitoring, search and rescue, intelligent transportation, and cooperative surveillance or attack. Performing these tasks requires control or optimization of the system's formation while maintaining network connectivity. Such systems are also potential targets for attack, and so techniques to secure the communications and control processes are important. In this project, techniques from computer networks are coupled with controls techniques to reconfigure the physical formation of a system of autonomous vehicles while maintaining network connectivity by "routing" vehicles through the formation to new positions. This approach is an enabling technology that also allows the network formation to be optimized to increase the efficiency of networked communication. New approaches to securing communication signals are coupled with the ability to transform the physical formation of the system to provide new approaches to achieving communication that is secure against eavesdroppers and robust to hostile jamming. The results of this project will be new algorithms, protocols, and controls techniques for formation control of systems of autonomous vehicles that are more flexible, efficient, and secure than the techniques currently available. These results will be widely applicable to future sensing/monitoring, homeland security, and defense operations involving autonomous systems of ground, air, surface, and underwater vehicles.
