Making Robotic Swarms Trustful: A Blockchain-Based Perspective

Lately the importance of swarm robotics has been recognized in a wide range of areas, including logistics, surveillance, disaster management, agriculture, and other industrial applications. The swarm intelligence introduced by the existing paradigm of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning often ignores the aspect of providing security and reliability guarantees. Consider a futuristic scenario wherein self-driving cars will transport people, self-driving trucks will carry cargo between warehouses, and a combination of legged robots/drones will ship cargo from warehouses to doorsteps. In the case of such a heterogeneous swarm of robots, it is crucial to ensure a trustful and reliable operating platform for smooth coordination, collaborative decision-making via appropriate consensus, and seamless information sharing while ensuring data security. In this direction, blockchain has been proven to be an effective technology that maintains the transactions (records) in a trustful manner after being validated through consensus. This guarantees accountability, transparency, and trust concerning the storage, safeguarding, and sharing of information among the parties. In this paper, we provide a walkthrough demonstrating the feasibility of using blockchain technology to make the robotic swarm trustful systems in their adoption to critical applications at large-scale. We highlight the pros and cons of the use of cloud vis-a-vis blockchain in swarm robotics. Finally, we present various future research opportunities pertaining to the adoption of blockchain technology in swarm robotics applications.