Adversarial Body Shape Search for Legged Robots
We propose an evolutionary computation method for an adversarial attack on the length and thickness of parts of legged robots by deep reinforcement learning. This attack changes the robot body shape and interferes with walking—we call the attacked body as adversarial body shape. The evolutionary computation method searches adversarial body shape by minimizing the expected cumulative reward earned through walking simulation. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we perform experiments with three legged robots, Walker2d, Ant-v2, and Humanoid-v2 in OpenAI Gym. The experimental results reveal that Walker2d and Ant-v2 are more vulnerable to the attack on the length than the thickness of the body parts, whereas Humanoid-v2 is vulnerable to the attack on both of the length and thickness. We further identify that the adversarial body shapes break left-right symmetry or shift the center of gravity of the legged robots. Finding adversarial body shape can be used to proactively diagnose the vulnerability of legged robot walking.
Takaaki Azakami, Hiroshi Kera, Kazuhiko Kawamoto, Adversarial Body Shape Search for Legged Robots, arXiv:2205.10187, 2022.
Adversarial joint attacks on legged robots
We address adversarial attacks on the actuators at the joints of legged robots trained by deep reinforcement learning. The vulnerability to the joint attacks can significantly impact the safety and robustness of legged robots. In this study, we demonstrate that the adversarial perturbations to the torque control signals of the actuators can significantly reduce the rewards and cause walking instability in robots. To find the adversarial torque perturbations, we develop black-box adversarial attacks, where, the adversary cannot access the neural networks trained by deep reinforcement learning. The black box attack can be applied to legged robots regardless of the architecture and algorithms of deep reinforcement learning. We employ three search methods for the black-box adversarial attacks: random search, differential evolution, and numerical gradient descent methods. In experiments with the quadruped robot Ant-v2 and the bipedal robot Humanoid-v2, in OpenAI Gym environments, we find that differential evolution can efficiently find the strongest torque perturbations among the three methods. In addition, we realize that the quadruped robot Ant-v2 is vulnerable to the adversarial perturbations, whereas the bipedal robot Humanoid-v2 is robust to the perturbations. Consequently, the joint attacks can be used for proactive diagnosis of robot walking instability.
Takuto Otomo, Hiroshi Kera, Kazuhiko Kawamoto, Adversarial joint attacks on legged robots, IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC), pp. 676-681, 2022.
Takuto Otomo, Hiroshi Kera, Kazuhiko Kawamoto, Adversarial joint attacks on legged robots, arXiv:2205.10098, 2022.