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About

Allan Tomlinson is a cybersecurity researcher whose career has been defined by a pioneering focus on the security of swarm robotics — a field inspired by the collective behaviours of social insects and animals. Beginning as early as 2008, Tomlinson was among the first researchers to systematically identify and articulate the security vulnerabilities inherent in swarm robotic systems, at a time when the field was still in its infancy. His landmark 2009 survey, "Survey on Security Challenges for Swarm Robotics," has accumulated 85 citations and remains a foundational reference, arguing presciently that security considerations must be embedded from the earliest stages of emerging technology development rather than retrofitted later. Alongside companion works on threats and malicious entities within swarms, Tomlinson built a comprehensive research programme covering threat modelling, attack taxonomies, and intrusion detection in robotic swarms, accumulating over 170 citations across his body of work. His sustained contributions over more than a decade — spanning surveys, theoretical models, and practical detection mechanisms — have helped establish swarm robotics security as a legitimate and necessary subfield, providing essential groundwork for researchers and engineers designing the next generation of autonomous multi-robot systems.