Blockchain based Swarm Robotics

the boids implementation
Unique ids stored in a smart contract

Inspiration

How could VIKI from I, Robot have saved herself? A secure decentralised existence in her army of NS-5 robots of course!

A recent binge on Defcon 27 hardware hacking got us thinking about future technologies that needed parallel development in security and ease of deployment. Swarm Robotics is one such field.

What it does

It creates a decentralised network for swarm robots, ensuring security, trust and possibly improve the decision making capability of the swarm (consensus concept). No new bot can be registered without it being registered through this network Each bot is given a unique id which is used to register it on the blockchain network. The idea is to dynamically store the current position, velocity etc on the block for ease of communication within the fleet in a secure fashion

How we built it

Created a private ethereum network (ganache), made a smart contract that currently holds the array and positions of each of the bots in the swarm.

This can be used for efficient fleet management in industries, disaster rescue, permission management, data logging for autonomous bots etc

Challenges we ran into

Originally the idea was to create a block for every bot in the network however it is not possible to edit a smart contract once deployed.

The ability to access the info in a block and edit it. Possible solution is to deploy a distributed database (using ipfs and ethereum)

Accomplishments that we are proud of

Learnt smart contract and blockchain deployment overnight

What we learned

Theory: All about blockchains, smart contracts and consensus Applications: Solidity, working with the web3.py library, swarm robotics, all about ethereum networks, truffle ( a little )