Blockchain-Empowered PSO for Scalable Swarm Robotics

Swarm robotics is an innovative field that utilizes collective behavior principles to design systems where multiple robots coordinate through simple rules and interactions. It faces the challenges of decentralized governance, security, and scalability. Due to its decentralized optimization capabilities, Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) has shown promise for controlling robot swarms. However, implementing PSO in a distributed manner still poses problems in achieving full scalability and fault-tolerant operation. Blockchain, a decentralized system that securely stores and distributes data, enables transparent and autonomous communication among robots. Integrating blockchain with PSO can potentially revolutionize swarm robotics by providing secure and decentralized coordination through Decentralized applications (Dapps). The work proposed here demonstrates the application of blockchain technology, utilizing ad-hoc techniques, to manage a swarm of robots in conjunction with particle swarm optimization for solving navigation paths. In particular, the emergent Tendermint platform is exploited as a lean blockchain infrastructure for supporting asynchronous swarm robotics applications by showing its main advantages compared to a more traditional blockchain platform.