Protecting the Privacy of Networked Multi-Agent Systems Controlled over the Cloud

The vision of an Internet-of-Things calls for combining the increasing connectivity of devices at the edge with the ability to compute either at the edge or on more powerful servers in the network. There is great interest in exploring the feasibility of these ideas when devices such as quadcopters or ground robots at the edge are controlled over the cloud, i.e., by leveraging computational power available elsewhere in the network. One of the main difficulties, especially in the context of the Internet-of-Battlefield- Things is the need to keep the data private. In this paper we propose a solution to this problem by extending previous results by the authors from a single system controlled over the cloud to networks of systems that are controlled and coordinated over the cloud. We propose a noncryptographic lightweight encoding scheme that ensures the privacy of the data exchanged by all the participating parties.