Theoretical Foundations of Threat Assessment by Inverse Optimal Control

Investigator:  Timothy Bretl

Starting from the premise that cyber attacks have quantifiable objectives, our long-term goal was to develop computational tools that quickly recover the objective associated with any given attack by observing its effects. Knowledge of this objective is critical to threat assessment. It allows us to understand the scope of an attack, to predict how the attack will proceed, and to respond in a systematic and targeted way. Our approach to recovering this objective was based on a new method for solving the problem of “inverse optimal control”. Much of our work focused on establishing the theoretical foundations for this method of solution. In this project we explored its application to threat assessment.

Hard Problem Addressed

Publications

  1. Zoe McCarthy and Timothy Bretl, “Mechanics and Manipulation of Planar Elastic Kinematic Chains”, 2012 International Conference on Robotics and Automation, St. Paul, MN, May 14-18, 2012. [full text]
  2. Abdullah Akce, James Norton, and Timothy Bretl, “A Brain-Machine Interface to Navigate Mobile Robots Along Human-Like Paths Amidst Obstacles”, 2012 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robot and Systems (IROS 2012), Vilamoura, Algarve, Portugal, October 7-12, 2012. [full text]
  3. Dennis Matthews and Timothy Bretl, “Experiments in Quasi-Static Manipulation of a Planar Elastic Rod”, 2012 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robot and Systems (IROS 2012), Vilamoura, Algarve, Portugal, October 7-12, 2012. [full text]
  4. Timothy Bretl and Zoe McCarthy, “Equilibrium Configurations of Kirchhoff Elastic Rod under Quasi-static Manipulation”, Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics X, volume 86 of series Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics, pages 71-87, 2013.
  5. Timothy Bretl and Zoe McCarthy, “Mechanics and Quasi-Static Manipulation of Planar Elastic Kinematic Chains”, IEEE Transactions on Robotics, volume 29, number 1, February 2013. [full text]
  6. Navid Aghasadeghi, Huihua Zhao, Levi J. Hargrove, Aaron D. Ames, Eric J. Perreault, Timothy Bretl, “Learning Impedance Controller Parameters for Lower-Lim Prostheses”, 2013 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2013), Tokyo, Japan, November 3-7, 2013. [full text]
  7. Miles Johnson, Navid Aghasadeghi, and Timothy Bretl, “Inverse Optimal Control for Deterministic Continuous-time Nonlinear Systems”, 52nd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, Florence, Italy, December 10-13, 2013. [full text]
  8. Timothy Bretl and Zoe McCarthy, “Quasi-static Manipulation of a Kirchhoff Elastic Rod Based on Geometric Analysis of Equilibrium Configurations”, International Journal of Robotics Research, volume 33, number 1, pages 48-68, January 14, 2014. [full text]