RESPECT

Artificial Intelligence and mobile robotics represent a significant transformation and boost for services in the healthcare sector. However, there are some cybersecurity-related barriers to the adoption of these technologies. 

The RESPECT project focuses its research on covering the number of incidents and cyber-attacks involving robotics operating in healthcare spaces (surgical, service, logistics, administrative, etc.).

So that, RESPECT project objective is to create a sustainable European and inter-sectoral network of organisations working on a joint research programme aiming to design and develop concrete defense strategies to ensure secure, safe, resilient and privacy-preserving operation of indoor mobile robotics solutions for logistic applications in healthcare environments. 

Specifically the main research objectives of the project are:

● Explore and identify system-specific cyber-physical weaknesses posing security, privacy, and safety threats, in autonomous mobile robots operating in a healthcare environment;

● Analyse surfaced vulnerability issues in conjunction with projected threats and propose defence measures and mitigation strategies towards safeguarding mobile robots operation.

● Define and standardize a minimal set of vulnerability testing procedures and guidelines leveraging and extending the Robot Vulnerability Scoring System for safe and autonomous robotic fleet management in a “safety-critical setting”. The project will be implemented through staff exchanges among different organizations with complementary expertise in cybersecurity, healthcare, cloud computing and robotics from 5 countries across EU promoting transfer of knowledge between industry and academia.

ROBOTNIK IN THE PROJECT

Robotnik’s role in the project is to integrate the developed novel estimation and control algorithms for safe and secure robot navigation into an autonomous robotic transport vehicle. The autonomous robotic vehicle should be able to navigate unattended at a predefined point and allow a safe human-robot interaction that minimizes stress and discomfort of humans when sharing the working space with the robot.

Robotnik will also contribute to the design and development of advanced and robust algorithms for global fleet localization to enhance the operation of the robots even with sparse, asynchronous and heterogeneous measurements. These algorithms are necessary to achieve an infrastructure-less multi-robot navigation system. 

On the other hand, Robotnik will offer its knowledge with ROS framework to include the defence measures developed for the project as well as the mitigation strategies. Additionally, procedures to isolate the robot in case of attack and monitor the status of each component will be designed and included.

Robotnik will lead the research task on pilot validation of the RESPECT toolset on the ENDORSE environment providing the core of the robot fleet necessary for the RESPECT project.