To make cars as safe as possible, we crash them into walls to pinpoint weaknesses and better protect people who use them.

That’s the idea behind a conducted by a 天美影视传媒 engineering team who 鈥� one used only for research purposes 鈥� to test how easily a malicious attack could hijack remotely-controlled operations in the future and to .

Real-world teleoperated robots, which are controlled by a human who may be in another physical location, are expected to become more commonplace as the technology evolves. They’re ideal for situations that are dangerous for people: fighting fires in chemical plants, diffusing explosive devices or extricating earthquake victims from collapsed buildings.

Outside of a handful of experimental surgeries conducted remotely, doctors typically use surgical robots today to operate on a patient in the same room using a secure, hardwired connection. But telerobots may one day routinely provide medical treatment in underdeveloped rural areas, battlefield scenarios, Ebola wards or catastrophic disasters happening half a world away.

In two recent papers, researchers demonstrated that next generation teleoperated robots using nonprivate networks 鈥� which may be the only option in disasters or in remote locations 鈥� can be easily disrupted or derailed by common forms of cyberattacks. Incorporating security measures to foil those attacks, the authors argue, will be critical to their safe adoption and use.

“We want to make the next generation of telerobots resilient to some of the threats we’ve detected without putting an operator or patient or any other person in the physical world in danger,” said lead author , a UW doctoral candidate in electrical engineering.

To expose vulnerabilities, the UW team mounted common types of cyberattacks as study participants used a teleoperated surgical robot developed at the UW for research purposes to move rubber blocks between pegs on a pegboard.

By mounting “man in the middle” attacks, which alter the commands flowing between the operator and robot, the team was able to maliciously disrupt a wide range of the robot’s functions 鈥� making it hard to grasp objects with the robot’s arms 鈥� and even to completely override command inputs. During denial-of-service attacks, in which the attacking machine flooded the system with useless data, the robots became jerky and harder to use.

In some cases, the human operators were eventually able to compensate for those disruptions, given the relatively simple task of moving blocks. In situations where precise movements can mean the difference between life and death 鈥� such as surgery or a search and rescue extrication 鈥� these types of cyberattacks could have more serious consequences, the researchers believe.

With a single packet of bad data, for instance, the team was able to maliciously trigger the robot’s emergency stop mechanism, rendering it useless.

The tests were conducted with the , an open source teleoperated robotic system developed by UW electrical engineering professor and former UW professor , along with their students. Raven II, currently manufactured and sold by Seattle-based , a UW spin-out, is a next generation teleoperated robotic system designed to support research in advanced techniques of robotic-assisted surgery. The system is not currently in clinical use and is not approved by the FDA.

The surgical robots that are FDA-approved for clinical use today, which typically allow a surgeon to remove tumors, repair heart valves or perform other procedures in a less invasive way, use a different communication channel and typically do not rely on publicly available networks, which would make the cyberattacks the UW team tested much harder to mount.

But if teleoperated robots will be used in locations with no secure alternative to networks or other communication channels that are easy to hack, it’s important to begin designing and incorporating additional security features now, the researchers argue.

“If there’s been a disaster, the network has probably been damaged too. So you might have to fly a drone and put a router on it and send signals up to it,” said , UW professor of electrical engineering and co-director of the UW BioRobotics Lab.

“In an ideal world, you’d always have a private network and everything could be controlled, but that’s not always going to be the case. We need to design for and test additional security measures now, before the next generation of telerobots are deployed.”

Encrypting data packets that flow between the robot and human operator would help prevent certain types of cyberattacks. But it isn’t effective against denial-of-service attacks that bog down the system with extraneous data. With video, encryption also runs the risk of causing unacceptable delays in delicate operations.

The UW team is also developing the concept of “,” which leverage the ways in which a particular surgeon or other teleoperator interacts with a robot to create a unique biometric signature.

By tracking the forces and torques that a particular operator applies to the console instruments and his or her interactions with the robot’s tools, the researchers have developed a novel way to validate that person’s identity and authenticate that the operator is the person he or she claims to be.

Moreover, monitoring those actions and reactions during a telerobotic procedure could give early warning that someone else has hijacked that process.

“Just as everyone signs something a little bit differently and you can identify people from the way they write different letters, different surgeons move the robotic system differently,” Chizeck said. “This would allow us to detect and raise the alarm if all of a sudden someone who doesn’t seem to be operator A is maliciously controlling or interfering with the procedure.”

Co-authors on the include UW electrical engineering graduate students and , of the UW computer science and engineering department, former UW computer science and engineering undergraduate , of the UW School of Law, and law student .

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation.

For more information, contact Bonaci at tbonaci@uw.edu and Chizeck at chizeck@uw.edu.

NSF grant: #CNS-1329751

天美影视传媒 doctoral student walked upstairs to get coffee on an ordinary spring morning in 2012. , his adviser and a UW electrical engineering professor, was ahead of him in line.

“Did you hear about the Hollywood thing?” Hannaford asked.

King recalls saying, “No, but I’m in.”

Hannaford went on to explain that a director from the movie “Ender’s Game” had contacted the UW to see about using the lab’s on the movie set.

That’s when King almost dropped his coffee.

“‘Ender’s Game’ is one of those iconic sci-fi books,” King explained. “When we got back to the lab and told people, everyone’s jaw collectively dropped.”

The movie “,” starring Harrison Ford and Asa Butterfield and directed by Gavin Hood, is based on the 1980s military science-fiction novel by Orson Scott Card. The movie opens Nov. 1 in theaters across the country.

Within a month of getting the call, King and then-UW bioengineering doctoral student Lee White packed up their lab’s surgical robot and flew to New Orleans. The students would be the sole operators of the robot during filming, and they also needed time to prepare its exterior to look less like a lab machine. The students helped to decide how the robot would operate to make it look as realistic as possible, King said.

“We were really part of the creative process of getting the robot on the set,” he said.

Less than a week later, they were filming on the movie set, a New Orleans NASA facility that builds rockets. King and White sat just off-set behind a curtain, where they used several computer monitors and controllers to move the robot’s four arms as it simulated brain surgery on one of the lead characters. The students ran the robot for more than 14 hours, and King still remembers feeling an intense pressure to perform. A day of filming is astronomically expensive, he explained, and each minute on the set counts, especially when producers, actors, directors, movie backers 鈥� and even caterers 鈥� are all keenly watching.

“We were petrified that something would break, that the robot would screw up,” King said. “Everything had to be working perfectly from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. on the set.”

At one point, King and White, now a medical student at Stanford University, controlled the robot during a close-up shoot. For several minutes, everyone watched as the students maneuvered the robot’s arms around and behind the actor’s head. King remembers “sweating bullets” and having to ignore swarms of Louisiana mosquitos attacking his legs and arms as he worked.

In a scene around the movie’s 58-minute mark, Bonzo Madrid, one of the main characters who is played by actor Mois茅s Arias, was critically injured and suffered brain trauma after a fight with Ender Wiggin at the battle school. The UW robot simulates opening Bonzo’s skull to operate on his brain. The scene deviates from the book’s plot, King said, and nearly all of the main characters are present.

King and White used a nonverbal signaling system to communicate as they operated the robot in tandem. It takes two people to move all four of the robot’s arms. The robot’s hands and wrists stayed locked in place and out of sight during filming, because those components are unrealistically large to simulate fine-tuned brain surgery. The robot’s hands were hidden behind Arias’ head and the actor held an emergency “off” button to press in case of a close call.

After the close-up shoot and more than 14 hours of operating, nothing broke or malfunctioned.

“At the end of the day, I asked the props director how we did,” King recalls with a laugh. “He said, ‘Let me put it this way, if they didn’t like it, it wouldn’t get a close-up.'”

Hannaford’s lab developed the first Raven surgical robot about 10 years ago after the U.S. Army expressed interest in technology for remote medical care. A next-generation Raven II was built through National Science Foundation funding and collaboration with of University of California, Santa Cruz, and sent to seven research universities, including the UW. This past summer five more universities purchased robots for research. Hannaford and Rosen recently spun out a company called to build future robots.

The Raven robots aren’t yet used in clinics for surgery, but that is the eventual goal, he said. Universities are mainly using them to design and test new hardware and software for tele-surgery procedures. The robots are designed to have state-of-the-art motion control and to fit in a standard operating room. A similar robot called the is currently used to perform minimally invasive procedures such as appendix, gallbladder and ovarian cyst removals.

After a week hanging out with the movie’s props team, exploring New Orleans and even joking around with Harrison Ford, the UW students returned to campus, where they had to stay tight-lipped about their robot’s stardom for more than a year. For King, who plans to graduate this year and has spent his entire doctorate working on the surgical robot, it’s a memorable way to finish his degree.

“It was a really fantastic experience,” he said.

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For more information, contact King at hawkeye1@uw.edu or 206-697-3955, and Hannaford at blake@ee.washington.edu or 206-412-0182.