Controlling Robots using Artificial Intelligence and a Consortium Blockchain
This work addresses the need for immutable and decentralized event registration in robotic systems, though it appears incremental by applying existing blockchain and AI technologies to a new domain.
The paper tackles the problem of secure and decentralized robotic control by proposing an architecture that uses blockchain as a ledger and smart contracts, integrated with external AI algorithms for image analysis, to enable modular and adaptable applications in contexts like manufacturing and network control.
Blockchain is a disruptive technology that is normally used within financial applications, however it can be very beneficial also in certain robotic contexts, such as when an immutable register of events is required. Among the several properties of Blockchain that can be useful within robotic environments, we find not just immutability but also decentralization of the data, irreversibility, accessibility and non-repudiation. In this paper, we propose an architecture that uses blockchain as a ledger and smart-contract technology for robotic control by using external parties, Oracles, to process data. We show how to register events in a secure way, how it is possible to use smart-contracts to control robots and how to interface with external Artificial Intelligence algorithms for image analysis. The proposed architecture is modular and can be used in multiple contexts such as in manufacturing, network control, robot control, and others, since it is easy to integrate, adapt, maintain and extend to new domains.