Inducing Defenders to Mislead an Attacking UAV Swarm

In recent years, the development of self-organizing and autonomous behaviors for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarms has increased significantly. Being flexible, scalable and robust, UAV swarms bring many advantages for future applications. However, these properties might also be used for malicious or dangerous applications like autonomous target-oriented attacks. To date, defense includes strategies like fighting the attackers with a defender swarm or exploiting hardware devices like nets and jammers to stop the attackers. These solutions increase the risk on collateral damage even further. To the best of our knowledge, research is lacking intelligent countermeasures against attacking UAV swarms which limit the damage as much as possible. In this paper, we explore how to invert a robust UAV swarm behavior by inducing defender UAVs into an attacking UAV swarm with the goal to mislead the swarm's mission. Via simulations, we model two different swarm behaviors and explore how to invert them with disguised UAVs deflecting the entire swarm.