BCT4ROS 2020

It’s been 11 years since Satoshi Nakamoto unleashed the first blockchain, the Bitcoin, into our lives. Since then, the theoretical and experimental foundations of blockchain systems are becoming increasingly well understood and today the term "blockchain" is not anymore a buzzword. And the the combination of such a ground-breaking technology with robotics, seems to be very promising since it would allow the robotic applications be more secure, flexible, autonomous, and even profitable.

Robotics is an interdisciplinary research area at the interface of computer science and engineering. Robotics involves design, construction, operation, and use of robots. The goal of robotics is to design intelligent machines that can help and assist humans in their day-to-day lives and keep everyone safe. 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. 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 immutable shared data structure, thanks to the distributed consensus protocols and cryptographic techniques, that can store various kinds of data including program codes (known as smart contracts) that can be deterministically executed the same way by all the participants. Thanks to its characteristics that fit very well the multi-agent systems, blockchain technologies show great potential for making robotic applications more open, trustworthy, secure and tolerant to faults.

Based on this observation, the BCT4ROS workshop series seek to move beyond the classical view of robotic systems to advance our comprehension about the conceivable outcomes and impediments of combining robots with blockchain innovation and intend to bring together specialists active in the scholarly community and industry to share tthe thoughts so far created and talk about the challenges still ahead.. We welcome all 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