CASPER: Context-Aware IoT Anomaly Detection System for Industrial Robotic Arms

The authors requested minor, non-substantive changes to the Version of Record (VoR). In accordance with ACM policies, a Corrected Version of Record was published on February 5, 2025. For reference purposes, the VoR may still be accessed via the Supplemental Material section of this citation page.

Industrial cyber-physical systems (ICPS) are widely employed in supervising and controlling critical infrastructures, with manufacturing systems that incorporate industrial robotic arms being a prominent example. The increasing adoption of ubiquitous computing technologies in these systems has led to benefits such as real-time monitoring, reduced maintenance costs, and high interconnectivity. This adoption has also brought cybersecurity vulnerabilities exploited by adversaries disrupting manufacturing processes via manipulating actuator behaviors. Previous incidents in the industrial cyber domain prove that adversaries launch sophisticated attacks rendering network-based anomaly detection mechanisms insufficient as the “physics” involved in the process is overlooked. To address this issue, we propose an IoT-based cyber-physical anomaly detection system that can detect motion-based behavioral changes in an industrial robotic arm. We apply both statistical and state-of-the-art machine learning methods to real-time Inertial Measurement Unit data collected from an edge development board attached to an arm doing a pick-and-place operation. To generate anomalies, we modify the joint velocity of the arm. Our goal is to create an air-gapped secondary protection layer to detect “physical” anomalies without depending on the integrity of network data, thus augmenting overall anomaly detection capability. Our empirical results show that the proposed system, which utilizes 1D convolutional neural networks, can successfully detect motion-based anomalies on a real-world industrial robotic arm. The significance of our work lies in its contribution to developing a comprehensive solution for ICPS security, which goes beyond conventional network-based methods.