Robust Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Small UAS Separation Assurance under GPS Degradation and Spoofing

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Zongo, Alex, Fotiadis, Filippos, Topcu, Ufuk, Wei, Peng
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Zongo, Alex
Fotiadis, Filippos
Topcu, Ufuk
Wei, Peng
author_facet Zongo, Alex
Fotiadis, Filippos
Topcu, Ufuk
Wei, Peng
contents We address robust separation assurance for small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (sUAS) under GPS degradation and spoofing via Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL). In cooperative surveillance, each aircraft (or agent) broadcasts its GPS-derived position; when such position broadcasts are corrupted, the entire observed air traffic state becomes unreliable. We cast this state observation corruption as a zero-sum game between the agents and an adversary: with probability R, the adversary perturbs the observed state to maximally degrade each agent's safety performance. We derive a closed-form expression for this adversarial perturbation, bypassing adversarial training entirely and enabling linear-time evaluation in the state dimension. We show that this expression approximates the true worst-case adversarial perturbation with second-order accuracy. We further bound the safety performance gap between clean and corrupted observations, showing that it degrades at most linearly with the corruption probability under Kullback-Leibler regularization. Finally, we integrate the closed-form adversarial policy into a MARL policy gradient algorithm to obtain a robust counter-policy for the agents. In a high-density sUAS simulation, we observe near-zero collision rates under corruption levels up to 35%, outperforming a baseline policy trained without adversarial perturbations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_28900
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Robust Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Small UAS Separation Assurance under GPS Degradation and Spoofing
Zongo, Alex
Fotiadis, Filippos
Topcu, Ufuk
Wei, Peng
Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Systems and Control
We address robust separation assurance for small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (sUAS) under GPS degradation and spoofing via Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL). In cooperative surveillance, each aircraft (or agent) broadcasts its GPS-derived position; when such position broadcasts are corrupted, the entire observed air traffic state becomes unreliable. We cast this state observation corruption as a zero-sum game between the agents and an adversary: with probability R, the adversary perturbs the observed state to maximally degrade each agent's safety performance. We derive a closed-form expression for this adversarial perturbation, bypassing adversarial training entirely and enabling linear-time evaluation in the state dimension. We show that this expression approximates the true worst-case adversarial perturbation with second-order accuracy. We further bound the safety performance gap between clean and corrupted observations, showing that it degrades at most linearly with the corruption probability under Kullback-Leibler regularization. Finally, we integrate the closed-form adversarial policy into a MARL policy gradient algorithm to obtain a robust counter-policy for the agents. In a high-density sUAS simulation, we observe near-zero collision rates under corruption levels up to 35%, outperforming a baseline policy trained without adversarial perturbations.
title Robust Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Small UAS Separation Assurance under GPS Degradation and Spoofing
topic Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Systems and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.28900