Swarm defences often cross-check GNSS positions against measured inter-drone distances. This paper shows that a slow common translation applied to every drone (a rigid-covert shift) keeps every pairwise distance intact, so no detector that uses relative geometry alone can see it. With trusted anchors it derives a drift-dependent detection floor and builds a recovery pipeline that rebuilds swarm geometry from ranges and aligns it to the anchors with Byzantine-robust fitting, reaching a median error of 0.39 m under about 10.1 m of GNSS drift (20 seeds); all tests are simulation and software-in-the-loop, with no RF hardware or real swarm.
Relevance
The blind spot is a gauge-freedom argument, and it applies to any team that only checks members against each other. Relative consistency cannot catch an attack that moves everyone together; see robot security and robust robotics.
Links
- arXiv
- Subfield: Security, Field robotics, Multi-robot systems