AUT Journal of Electrical Engineering

AUT Journal of Electrical Engineering

Integrating Real Secret Sharing with Distributed MPC for Confidential and Collision-Resilient Multi-Quadrotor Formations

Document Type : Research Article

Author
Faculty of Engineering and Flight, Imam Ali University, Tehran, Iran
Abstract
This paper presents a novel framework that integrates secure, distributed computation with advanced control to enable confidential and collision-resilient formation flight for multiple quadrotors. Conventional multi-agent systems are vulnerable to cyber threats such as eavesdropping and data manipulation, which can destabilize formations and compromise missions. In this study, to address this issue, Model Predictive Control is combined with a multi‑party computation protocol based on secret sharing. In this approach, each quadrotor converts its state data into secret shares and distributes them among the agents, and the required control computations are performed collaboratively on the encrypted data without revealing any sensitive information. This decentralized approach eliminates the central controller as a single point of failure and attack. Simulation results for six quadrotors flying in a circular formation among obstacles show that the system maintains formation accuracy and collision avoidance while remaining robust against eavesdropping and data manipulation. Quantitative evaluation shows that the formation tracking error remains below 0.08 m, all inter-agent and obstacle collisions are successfully avoided (100% success rate), and the secret-sharing protocol reconstructs the optimal control signals with a normalized mean squared error of less than 10⁻⁶, ensuring cryptographic integrity without compromising formation performance. The integration fundamentally enhances operational security, preserves agent privacy, and improves system fault tolerance and scalability for real-world adversarial environments.
Keywords
Subjects

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