Robot Security Education: Hands-on Lab Activities Based Teaching Approach

Abstract

Security is particularly important in robotics. The inclusion of robot security education in curricula offering courses on robotics is therefore considered a valuable extension. However, robot security is covered very briefly in most curricula and there is a clear lack of education publications that discuss related teaching materials and hands-on lab activities. This paper contributes to fill this gap by providing a method for enhancing the teaching of robot security, using a hands-on lab based educational approach. The details of comprehensive hands-on lab activities that can be used in didactic environments to evaluate and enhance robot security are presented. Practically, throughout the hands-on lab activities, the resilience and robustness of a popular robot, called NAO, are evaluated against common Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. The hands-on activities demonstrate clearly that NAO robot is very vulnerable to DoS attacks and does not deploy built-in efficient security features to prevent and limit the success of the attacks. Moreover, the discussed hands-on lab activities can be considered as the basis to develop similar activities using other types of robots and attacks and are designed to accompany and compliment any existing trade or academic press text.