Review
A Survey on Blockchain in Robotics: Issues, Opportunities, Challenges and Future Directions

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jnca.2021.103245Get rights and content
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Abstract

Robotics is the multi-disciplinary domain that is booming in today’s world, and expanding its roots deep into various fields of research, manufacturing industries, healthcare, and even in our day-to-day lives. Nevertheless, as with any other evolving technology, robotics face numerous challenges. In this context, lately, blockchain technology has been identified as a promising technology to resolve many of these issues such as identification of malicious/rogue nodes, malfunctioning/faults in automated processes, non-compliance to the agreed norms and privacy rules, security attacks on robotic systems, and non-transparency in performance monitoring and audits. In particular, blockchain with its features like decentrality, immutability, provenance, low operational cost, tight access control, and trustworthy operations, can offer significant improvements to new applications and use cases driven by robotics. Thus, the paper begins with exploring the key requirements and technical challenges encountered by robots in general. Next, it provides detailed overview of blockchain technology in a tutorial style. Then, the role of blockchain for different uses cases of robotics are surveyed. Furthermore, various technical challenges that need to be mitigated to harness full potential of blockchain for robotics are highlighted. Finally, the future research directions are presented that can pave the way ahead for advancements and profitable integration of blockchain in the realm of robotics.

Keywords

Blockchain
Robotics
Smart contracts

Cited by (0)

U. S. P. Srinivas Aditya is an Embedded System Engineer working at IoT - Cognitive Systems & Industrial Robotics Lab, Tata Consultancy Services, Kochi, India. Srinivas has more than three years of industrial experience in the field of electronics and software development for robotic automation projects, including research oriented projects and system architecture modeling for custom-made robots as a part of the R&D team. He is an alumnus of Electronics and Communication engineering department, Jaipur National University, batch of 2017, with a Bachelor’s degree in ECE. He was an active member of Research and Developmental cell of the university during his course. He is currently pursuing M. Tech in Embedded Systems from Birla Institute of Technology and Sciences, Pilani. His academic interests are robotic control systems, pathplanning algorithms and UAV development.

Roshan Singh received his Diploma in Computer Engineering from Central Institute of Technology, Kokrajhar, in 2016, and a B.Tech degree with first class in Computer Science and Engineering in the year 2019. He is pursuing Master of Technology from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Guwahati. He is also a certified elite in Blockchain Architecture and Design from the National Programme on Technology Enabled Learning, India, His areas of research interests include Blockchain Technology, IoT and Intelligent Transportation Systems. He has published various papers on blockchain and IoT security in various journals including IEEE and Springer. His work “Managing Smart Home Appliances with Proof-of-Authority and Blockchain” bagged 2nd Best Paper Award at i4CS Conference, Germany, 2019. At present at Open Source Intelligent Laboratory he takes on the task of Distributed Processing of Complex Networks. More details: https://sites.google.com/view/roshansinghindia/home.

Pranav Kumar Singh (Member, IEEE) received the Ph.D., B.Tech. and M.Tech. in Computer Science and Engineering. He is working as an Assistant Professor with the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Central Institute of Technology at Kokrajhar, India. He has more than 13 years of teaching experience. He has also served as a Nodal Officer NKN and IPv6 Road Map of CITK, an initiative by the Government of India. He served as a Technical Program Committee (TPC) member for several international conferences. He is an active reviewer of many top Journals. He has published around 34 journal articles/conference papers. His research interests include vehicular communications, security and privacy, software-defined vehicular networking, QoS and QoE in wireless communication, intelligent transportation systems, blockchain, and the IoT. More Details: https://cit.ac.in/departments/profile/cse/pranavkumar-singh.

Anshuman Kalla is working as Postdoctoral Visiting Researcher at Centre for Wireless Communications (CWC), University of Oulu, Finland. Dr. Kalla has more than ten years of teaching and research experience. He graduated as Engineer from Govt. Engineering College Bikaner in 2004. He did Master of Science in Telecommunications and Wireless Networking from ISEP, Paris, France in 2008 and another Master from University of Nice Sophia Antipolis, France in 2011. He obtained Ph.D. degree in 2017. Dr. Kalla was recipient of Master’s scholarships from Government of France for pursuing both the Master programs. Dr. Kalla has delivered invited sessions and talks during various Short Term Courses, Faculty Development Programs, Workshops, webinars and Conferences. He has delivered tutorials at IEEE 5GWF 2020, IEEE ANTS 2020, and ICETCI 2021. Dr. Kalla has served as member of Technical Program Committee (TPC) for numerous international conferences and has also been reviewer for prestigious international journals of IEEE and Elsevier. His area of interests is Blockchain, 5G, 6G, IoT, ICN, and SDN. For more https://sites.google.com/site/kallanshuman/.