Incorporating Observation Error when Modeling Trust between Multiple Robots Sharing a Common Workspace: (Extended Abstract)

Most multi-robot systems assume all robots are programmed to cooperate and complete tasks without consideration of dishonest robots seeking to maximize their own benefit. The work presented here develops and analyzes a distributed trust estimation framework that allows robots to estimate the trustworthiness of other robots in the community, and share these estimates to enable cooperative trust estimation. Our previous work has shown that when observation errors were ignored, the trust-estimation error converges to a steady state value over time. We extend this previous work, by now considering the effects of observation error and proving that trust-estimation error converges.