Engineering Commons^™

Non-Trivial Off-Path Network Measurements Without Shared Side-Channel Resource Exhaustion, Geoffrey I. Alexander

Computer Science ETDs

Most traditional network measurement scans and attacks are carried out through the use of direct, on-path network packet transmission. This requires that a machine be on-path (i.e, involved in the packet transmission process) and as a result have direct access to the data packets being transmitted. This limits network scans and attacks to situations where access can be gained to an on-path machine. If, for example, a researcher wanted to measure the round trip time between two machines they did not have access to, traditional scans would be of little help as they require access to an on-path machine to …

Robot Motion Planning In Dynamic Environments, Hao-Tien Lewis Chiang

Computer Science ETDs

Robot motion planning in dynamic environments is critical for many robotic applications, such as self-driving cars, UAVs and service robots operating in changing environments. However, motion planning in dynamic environments is very challenging as this problem has been shown to be NP-Hard and in PSPACE, even in the simplest case. As a result, the lack of safe, efficient planning solutions for real-world robots is one of the biggest obstacles for ubiquitous adoption of robots in everyday life. Specifically, there are four main challenges facing motion planning in dynamic environments: obstacle motion uncertainty, obstacle interaction, complex robot dynamics and noise, and …

Thwarting Adversaries With Randomness And Irrationality, Abhinav Aggarwal

Computer Science ETDs

Distributed systems are ubiquitous today: from the Internet used by billions of people around the world to the small scale IoT devices. With this rapidly increasing need to perform computation at scales larger than ever before, comes the need to ensure resilience to adversarial failures so that these systems can continue to behave as intended even when some malicious tampering happens.

In this dissertation, we explore the power of randomness and the difficulty of rationally approximating the Golden Ratio to thwart adversarial behavior in two different problems in distributed computing: interactive communication and robust collaborative search. While randomness helps with …

An Efficient Multiple-Place Foraging Algorithm For Scalable Robot Swarms, Qi Lu

Computer Science ETDs

Searching and collecting multiple resources from large unmapped environments is an important challenge. It is particularly difficult given limited time, a large search area and incomplete data about the environment. This search task is an abstraction of many real-world applications such as search and rescue, hazardous material clean-up, and space exploration. The collective foraging behavior of robot swarms is an effective approach for this task. In our work, individual robots have limited sensing and communication range (like ants), but they are organized and work together to complete foraging tasks collectively. An efficient foraging algorithm coordinates robots to search and collect …