A Robot Operating System Framework for Secure UAV Communications

Abstract

To perform advanced operations with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), it is crucial that components other than the existing ones such as flight controller, network devices, and ground control station (GCS) are also used. The inevitable addition of hardware and software to accomplish UAV operations may lead to security vulnerabilities through various vectors. Hence, we propose a security framework in this study to improve the security of an unmanned aerial system (UAS). The proposed framework operates in the robot operating system (ROS) and is designed to focus on sev-eral perspectives, such as overhead arising from additional security elements and security issues essential for flight missions. The UAS is operated in a nonnative and native ROS environment. The performance of the proposed framework in both environments is verified through experiments. © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.