RobotChain
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RobotChain
RobotChain
Blockchain for robots in factories that can leverage Smart-contracts and Artificial Intelligence.

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ABOUT THE PROJECT

RobotChain is a consortium Blockchain designed for robots in factories. It is an optimized Blockchain that contains on-chain properties that speed-up the validation process and reduce the number of resources needed to both validate transactions and to store them on the devices. The premise is that RobotChain is inserted in small and cheap computer units that are connected to robots in order to allow them to store events and others inside RobotChain. By using smart-contracts we also leverage Artificial Intelligence algorithms and we not only show that it is possible to integrate Blockchain + Robotics + Artificial Intelligence, but we provide the tools needed to have a unique system capable of serving as a ledger, as a communication gate and as an autonomous software that automatically and without human intervention have action-triggers. Moreover, RobotChain provides properties such as accessibility, auditability, non-repudiation, decentralization of data and applications, (pseudo) anonymity, replication, irreversibility, and others that guarantee that both the robots and the data are secure.

Smart-Contracts

RobotChain uses smart-contracts to communicate with external parties and to autonomously and automatically have action-triggers on the Blockchain and on Robots.

On-Chain Solutions

RobotChain has on-chain solutions that reduce the amount of space needed to store the data and the time needed to validate transactions. Improving tremendously the Blockchain inner concepts and allowing smaller devices to run it.

Integration

RobotChain allows the integration with Artificial Intelligence and communication with Oracles to improve its properties and allow Robots to use them.

Support

RobotChain allows the creation of modules by using smart-contracts. With this, it is possible to have a unique system that agglomerates all the applications required.

Research

We proved that RobotChain can be used to improve Robot capabilities, securely store data and to serve as a unique system that integrates many disruptive technologies. Furthermore, we conducted research that not only integrates blockchain with robotics and artificial intelligence but also improves the inner components of the blockchain technology.

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THE TEAM

Luís

Luís A. Alexandre

Project Coordinator

Full Professor at University of Beira Interior. Coordinator and superviser of the RobotChain project.

Vasco

Vasco Lopes

Researcher

Worked on integrating Blockchain with Robotics and leveraging Artificial Intelligence algorithms over it.

Miguel

Miguel Fernandes

Researcher

Focused on developing the Blockchain and creating on-chain protocols to improve its inner work.

3
Team Members
2
Master's Thesis
6
Research Papers
37.000€
Funding

Master's Thesis

Blockchain technology is not only growing everyday at a fast-passed rhythm, but it is also a disruptive technology that has changed how we look at financial transactions. By providing a way to trust an unknown network and by allowing us to conduct transactions without the need for a central authority, blockchain has grown exponentially. Moreover, blockchain also provides decentralization of the data, immutability, accessibility, non-repudiation and irreversibility properties that makes this technology a must in many industries. But, even thought blockchain provides interesting properties, it has not been extensively used outside the financial scope. Similarly, robots have been increasingly used in factories to automate tasks that range from picking objects, to transporting them and also to work collaboratively with humans to perform complex tasks. It is important to enforce that robots act between legal and moral boundaries and that their events and data are securely stored and auditable. This rarely happens, as robots are programmed to do a specific task without certainty that that task will always be performed correctly and their data is either locally stored, without security measures, or disregarded. This means that the data, especially logs, can be altered, which means that robots and manufacturers can be accused of problems that they did not cause. Henceforth, in this work, we sought to integrate blockchain with robotics with the goal to provide enhanced security to robots, to the data and to leverage artificial intelligence algorithms. By doing an extensive overview of the methods that integrate blockchain and artificial intelligence or robotics, we found that this is a growing field but there is a lack of proposals that try to improve robotic systems by using blockchain. It was also clear that most of the existing proposals that integrate artificial intelligence and blockchain, are focused on building marketplaces and only use the latter to storage transactions. So, in this document, we proposed three different methods that use blockchain to solve different problems associated with robots. The first one is a method to securely store robot logs in a blockchain by using smart-contracts as storage and automatically detect when anomalies occur in a robot by using the data contained in the blockchain and a smart-contract. By using smart-contracts, it is assured that the data is secure and immutable as long as the blockchain has enough peers to participate in the consensus process. The second method goes beyond registering events to also register information about external sensors, like a camera, and by using smart-contracts to allow Oracles to interact with the blockchain, it was possible to leverage image analysis algorithms that can detect the presence of material to be picked. This information is then inserted into a smart-contract that automatically defines the movement that a robot should have, regarding the number of materials present to be picked. The third proposal is a method that uses blockchain to store information about the robots and the images derived from a Kinect. This information is then used by Oracles that check if there is any person located inside a robot workspace. If there is any, this information is stored and different Oracles try to identify the person. Then, a smart-contract acts appropriately by changing or even stopping the robot depending on the identity of the person and if the person is located inside the warning or the critical zone surrounding the robot. With this work, we show how blockchain can be used in robotic environments and how it can beneficial in contexts where multi-party cooperation, security, and decentralization of the data is essential. We also show how Oracles can interact with the blockchain and distributively cooperate to leverage artificial intelligence algorithms to perform analysis in the data that allow us to detect robotic anomalies, material in images and the presence of people. We also show that smart-contracts can be used to perform more tasks than just serve the purpose of automatically do monetary transactions. The proposed architectures are modular and can be used in multiple contexts such as in manufacturing, network control, robot control, and others since they are easy to integrate, adapt, maintain and extend to new domains. We expect that the intersection of blockchain and robotics will shape part of the future of robotics once blockchain is more widely used and easy to integrate. This integration will be very prominent in tasks where robots need to behave under certain constraints, in swarm robotics due to the fact that blockchain offers global information and in factories because the actions undertaken by a robot can easily be extended to the rest of the robots by using smart-contracts.

RobotChain: Artificial Intelligence on a Blockchain using Tezos Technology

Universidade da Beira Interior, July 2019
Vasco Lopes
Thesis link

Robots are important equipment in the modern day factory environment. To maintain and improve factory productivity, ledgers containing robotic actions may be used to identify possible bottleneck points in a assembly line or to serve as a record of in unintentional behaviours, be it of a malicious nature or not. Blockchains are a type of secure ledger, that prevent unwanted changes. These blockchains, during their lifetimes, record large amounts of data, that in a common usage its kept on its entirety. This dissertation presents RobotChain, a possible solution using blockchain technology that prevents unwanted changes in a robotic action ledger, and provides a way to use the said ledger in order to aid in production efficiency or other management requirements, and presents a time-segmentation solution for devices with limited storage capacity, integrated in RobotChain. It also presents various experiments related to the performance of Tezos blockchain network with the various modifications.

RobotChain: a Blockchain for Registering Robot Events using Tezos Technology

Universidade da Beira Interior, July 2019
Miguel Fernandes
Thesis link

Publications

Blockchain has been used extensively for financial purposes, but this technology can also be beneficial in other contexts where multi-party cooperation, security and decentralization of the data is essential. Properties such as immutability, accessibility and non-repudiation and the existence of smart-contracts make blockchain technology very interesting in robotic contexts that require event registration or integration with Artificial Intelligence. In this paper, we propose a system that leverages blockchain as a ledger to register events and information to be processed by Oracles and uses smart-contracts to control robots by adjusting their velocity, or stopping them, if a person enters the robot working space without permission. We show how blockchain can be used in computer vision problems by interacting with multiple external parties, Oracles, that perform image analysis and how it is possible to use multiple smart-contracts for different tasks. The method proposed is shown in a scenario representing a factory environment, but since it is modular, it can be easily adapted and extended for other contexts, allowing for simple integration and maintenance.

Robot Workspace Monitoring using a Blockchain-based 3D Vision Approach

Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops, June 2019
Vasco Lopes, Nuno Pereira, Luís A. Alexandre
Paper link

A blockchain, during its lifetime, records large amounts of data, that in a common usage its kept on its entirety. In a robotics environment, the old information is useful for human evaluation, or oracles interfacing with the blockchain but it is not useful for the robots that require only current information in order to continue their work. This causes a storage problem in blockchain nodes that have limited storage capacity, such as in the case of nodes attached to robots that are usually built around embedded solutions. This paper presents a time-segmentation solution for devices with limited storage capacity, integrated in a particular robot-directed blockchain called RobotChain. Results are presented regarding the proposed solution that show that the goal of restricting each node's capacity is reached without compromising all the benefits that arise from the use of blockchains in these contexts, and on the contrary, it allows for cheap nodes to use this blockchain, reduces storage costs and allows faster deployment of new nodes.

A Time-Segmented Consortium Blockchain for Robotic Event Registration

CoRR, abs/1904.04306, 2019
Miguel Fernandes, Luís A. Alexandre
Paper link

Blockchain has been used extensively for financial purposes, but this technology can also be beneficial in other contexts where multi-party cooperation, security and decentralization of the data is essential. Properties such as immutability, accessibility and non-repudiation and the existence of smart-contracts make blockchain technology very interesting in robotic contexts that require event registration or integration with Artificial Intelligence. In this paper, we propose a system that leverages blockchain as a ledger to register events and information to be processed by Oracles and uses smart-contracts to control robots by adjusting their velocity, or stopping them, if a person enters the robot working space without permission. We show how blockchain can be used in computer vision problems by interacting with multiple external parties, Oracles, that perform image analysis and how it is possible to use multiple smart-contracts for different tasks. The method proposed is shown in a scenario representing a factory environment, but since it is modular, it can be easily adapted and extended for other contexts, allowing for simple integration and maintenance.


Controlling Robots using Artificial Intelligence and a Consortium Blockchain

CoRR, abs/1903.00660, 2019
Vasco Lopes, Nuno Pereira, Luís A. Alexandre
Paper link


Robotic events can provide notable amounts of information regarding a robot's status, which can be extrapolated to detect productivity, anomalies, malfunctions and used for monitorization. However, when problems occur in sensitive environments like a factory, the logs of a machine may be discarded because they are susceptible to chances and malicious intents. In this paper we propose to use RobotChain for anomaly detection. RobotChain is a method to securely register robotic events, using a blockchain, which ensures that once an event gets registered on it, it's secured and cannot be tampered with. We show how this system can be leveraged with the module for anomaly detection, that uses the information contained on the blockchain to detect anomalies on a UR3 robot.

Detecting Robotic Anomalies using RobotChain

19th IEEE International Conference on Autonomous Robot Systems and Competitions, April 2019
Vasco Lopes, Luís A. Alexandre
Paper link

Blockchain technology is growing everyday at a fast-passed rhythm and it is possible to integrate it with many systems, namely Robotics with AI services. However, this is still a recent field and there is not yet a clear understanding of what it could potentially become. In this paper, we conduct an overview of many different methods and platforms that try to leverage the power of blockchain into robotic systems, to improve AI services, or to solve problems that are present in the major blockchains, which can lead to the ability of creating robotic systems with increased capabilities and security. We present an overview, discuss the methods, and conclude the paper with our view on the future of the integration of these technologies.

An Overview of Blockchain Integration with Robotics and Artificial Intelligence

Symposium on Blockchain for Robotic Systems, MIT Media Lab, Dec. 2018, DOI: 10.5195/ledger.2019.171
Vasco Lopes, Luís A. Alexandre
Paper link
Extended Paper

Robots are important equipment in the modern day factory environment. To maintain and improve factory productivity, ledgers containing robotic actions may be used to identify possible bottleneck points in a assembly line or to serve as a record of in unintentional behaviours, be it of a malicious nature or not. In this paper we present RobotChain, a possible solution using blockchain technology that prevents unwanted changes in a robotic action ledger, and provides a way to use the said ledger in order to aid in production efficiency or other management requirements. This paper also presents an initial experimental study of the Tezos blockchain in order to understand the challenges related to using its advanced blockchain technology for the RobotChain implementation.

Robotchain: Using Tezos Technology for Robot Event Management

Symposium on Blockchain for Robotic Systems, MIT Media Lab, Dec. 2018, DOI: 10.5195/ledger.2019.171
Miguel Fernandes, Luís A. Alexandre
Paper link

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Covilhã, PT

Phone: +351 275 242 081

Email: luis.alexandre@ubi.pt