BCT4ROS 2019

From science fiction to the university laboratories, and now to the real world, robotics and blockchains are not just buzzwords anymore but are emerging technologies – the expected market potential is in the tens of billions of dollars in the next ten years.

Robotics is the branch of technology that deals with the design, construction, operation and application of robots and computer systems for their control, sensory feedback, and information processing. It is a broad and diverse field related to many commercial industries and consumer uses. Robots have come to play a widespread and crucial role in many applications today: industrial robots, military robots, medical robots, cobots, swarm robots, autonomous drones and so on. However, it is quite challenging to perform research and development in enabling and fostering the development of autonomous robots and to help such robots become accepted by society. In order to enable the development of robots that can operate autonomously and safely, important issues like data privacy, security and transparency need to be tackled for the future use of robots in high-sensitive scenarios. Therefore, solutions to these issues might be necessary steps towards mainstream adoption.

Blockchain technologies provide an incorruptible shared data structure that can be programmed to record any kind of data and calculations (e.g., measurement of real effects, operating conditions, reference situation) in a multi-agent/multi-robot environment. More specifically, blockchains guarantee that the recorded data is immutable, thanks to cryptographic techniques, and highly replicated thanks to distributed consensus protocols. Together with smart contracts, transactional protocols between agents stored in the blockchain, blockchain technologies show great potential to make robotic applications more open, trustworthy, secure and tolerant to faults.

Based on this observation, the BCT4ROS workshop seeks to move beyond the classical view of robotic systems to advance our understanding about the possibilities and limitations of combining robots with blockchain technology and aims to gather researchers active in academia and industry to share the ideas so far developed and discuss the challenges still ahead. We welcome papers that address and evaluate the relevance of blockchain technologies to overcome the limitations of robotic systems.

• Trustworthy robot — human interaction
• Privacy and security for robotic systems
• Autonomous cyber-physical systems
• Blockchain for networked systems and IoT
• Peer-to-peer and distributed models for robotic systems
• Self-regulated robotic systems
• Distributed sensing and coordination
• Blockchain and mobile systems
• Blockchain for multi-agent systems
• Citizen science
• Decentralized business models for robots
• Blockchain and Industry 4.0
• Blockchain and Robot Economics