Robotic Services for New Paradigm Smart Cities Based on Decentralized Technologies

Abstract

This article describes different methods of organizing robotic services for smart cities using secure encrypted decentralized technologies and market mechanisms—as opposed to models based on centralized solutions based (or not) on using cloud services and stripping citizens of the control of their own data. The basis of the proposed methods is the Ethereum decentralized computer with the mechanism of smart contracts. In this work, special attention is paid to the integration of technical and economic information into one network of transactions, which allows creating a unified way of interaction between robots—the robot economy. Three possible scenarios of robotic services for smart cities based on the economy of robots are presented: unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), environmental monitoring, and smart factories. In order to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed scenarios, three experiments are presented and discussed. Our work shows that the Ethereum network can provide, through smart contracts and their ability to activate programs to interact with the physical world, an effective and practical way to manage robot services for smart cities.

Trustable Environmental Monitoring by Means of Sensors Networks on Swarming Autonomous Marine Vessels and Distributed Ledger Technology

“…In previous work of some of the authors, successful operation of several unmanned aerial vehicles on the Robonomics platform was demonstrated (Kapitonov et al, 2019 ); in the current research we are extending the approach to monitor the state of the environment, in particular of water quality. In this article we describe the operation of a small swarm of marine surface autonomous vehicles equipped with sensors in charge of performing water quality measuring, guided by a “leader” autonomous marine vessel managing a distributed secure registry of the samples by means of the Robonomics platform.…”

“…The goal is to have a shared control network system integrating a bio-inspired swarm management into a secure distributed ledger. Previously some authors have proposed either pure blockchain solutions (Kapitonov et al, 2019 ) or swarm solutions (Strobel et al, 2018 ) where each node is a blockchain node (something that makes the swarm operation slow).…”

“…This approach on the one hand allows to exploit the adaptivity of swarm intelligence and its capability to manage large numbers of robots, on the other hand applying blockchain algorithms to all the nodes in a swarm is at present difficult to put in practice for practical performance reasons. In Kapitonov et al ( 2019 ) blockchain technologies are proposed as a tool to manage general ranging from Smart Cities to Citizen Science in multi vendor heterogeneous environments. However, the network robotics approach does not allow to efficiently and effectively manage a very large number of robots or intelligent devices and sensors.…”

Blockchain-Empowered Multi-Robot Collaboration to Fight COVID-19 and Future Pandemics

“…The World Health Organization (WHO) is considered coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID- 19) as an international pandemic epidemic on 11 March 2020. On 16 October 2020, WHO reported that the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases reached 38789204, and 1095097 confirm deaths [1].…”

“…With blockchain, independent robots can reach consensus without a central controller. Smart contracts provide great potential to enable more secure [17], autonomous, flexible, and even profitable [19] robotic operations [20]. Combating the COVID-19 outbreak requires automatic robots to collaborate with each other in a decentralized fashion without human intervention during task performance.…”