A Blockchain-Based Service-Oriented Framework to Enable Cooperation of Swarm Robots

Chung-Yu Huang, Jhih-Yi Li, Jhih-Yuan Huang, Wei-Po Lee

Abstract: Swarm robotics has been proposed to achieve tasks by the cooperation and coordination among distributed simple robots. To overcome the practical issues of deploying a swarm robotic system, we present a blockchain-based service-oriented framework to ensure the secured cooperation among heterogeneous swarm robots. Our work adopts smart contracts working on the blockchain to design service functions for swarm robots. The major service functions for the robot nodes include requesting the services, selecting suitable services based on the quality and creating composite services to achieve complex tasks. Considering the market-oriented cooperation condition of the real world, we design a service trading mechanism to take into account utilities of service requesters and providers. We conduct a series of experiments to evaluate the framework, and the results show the promising of the presented approach.