Sarah Spurgeon | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

To What Extent Can Inherent Communication Noise Guarantee Privacy in Distributed Cooperative Control?

This paper proposes a differentially private distributed cooperative control scheme for multi-agent systems (MAS). Unlike conventional approaches that actively inject artificial noise for privacy protection, this work investigates whether inherent communication noise can itself serve as a natural privacy mechanism. A physically motivated communication-noise model is developed for mobile MAS by incorporating transmitter perturbation, receiver noise, path-loss attenuation, and log-normal shadowing. The resulting effective noise variance depends on inter-agent state differences, thereby capturing the distance-dependent signal perturbation arising in practice. Based on this model, a distributed finite-horizon Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) mechanism is designed to achieve formation tracking while protecting agents' private control preferences. Rather than protecting the full local cost function, the proposed privacy formulation focuses on the ratio of the LQR weighting matrices, which captures the trade-off between tracking accuracy and control effort when the quadratic cost structure is publicly known. A set-theoretic sensitivity analysis shows that this weighting-ratio adjacency formulation yields less conservative privacy bounds than gradient-based protection under the considered addition/removal adjacency relation. Theoretical analysis demonstrates that, under suitable design conditions, the proposed mechanism provides bounded cumulative (\epsilon,\delta)-differential privacy guarantees for the weighting ratios over an infinite horizon without artificial noise injection. Meanwhile, the cooperative tracking error is shown to converge almost surely and in mean square to a finite random limit, with its expectation remaining bounded. Numerical examples validate the theoretical results and illustrate the resulting privacy-performance trade-off.

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arXiv2023

Deep Reinforcement Learning for Concentric Tube Robot Path Following

As surgical interventions trend towards minimally invasive approaches, Concentric Tube Robots (CTRs) have been explored for various interventions such as brain, eye, fetoscopic, lung, cardiac and prostate surgeries. Arranged concentrically, each tube is rotated and translated independently to move the robot end-effector position, making kinematics and control challenging. Classical model-based approaches have been previously investigated with developments in deep learning based approaches outperforming more classical approaches in both forward kinematics and shape estimation. We propose a deep reinforcement learning approach to control where we generalise across two to four systems, an element not yet achieved in any other deep learning approach for CTRs. In this way we explore the likely robustness of the control approach. Also investigated is the impact of rotational constraints applied on tube actuation and the effects on error metrics. We evaluate inverse kinematics errors and tracking error for path following tasks and compare the results to those achieved using state of the art methods. Additionally, as current results are performed in simulation, we also investigate a domain transfer approach known as domain randomization and evaluate error metrics as an initial step towards hardware implementation. Finally, we compare our method to a Jacobian approach found in literature.

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