Security and Safety in Urban Environments: Evaluating Threats and Risks of Autonomous Last-Mile Delivery Robots

Due to the increasing demand for online shopping and the shortage of human parcel carriers, on-time home deliveries are becoming more and more challenging. The use of autonomous last-mile delivery robots in urban environment is a good solution to meet these needs. In this unpredictable environment, it is important to ensure security and human safety. Security includes the integrity, availability and confidentiality of data about the robot’s location and environment, as well as the contents of the parcel. Both the contents of the package (e.g. poison) and the movement of the robot (if it collides with a human) could be harmful to a human. Therefore, in this environment, the safety of humans should be given the highest priority. To the best of our knowledge, both safety and security aspects of last-mile robots in urban environments have not yet been investigated in the literature. We fill this gap by: (1) extending the multi-level model from the literature with an additional level to represent human safety, (2) analysing the sensors of a real last-mile robot, (3) grouping different types of attacks against the robot (physical attacks, cyber attacks and both), (4) analysing the consequences of these attacks, and (5) identifying the trade-off between security and delivery guarantee while still ensuring human safety.