Blockchain for Multi-Robot Collaboration to Combat COVID-19 and Future Pandemics

TL;DR

This paper explores how integrating blockchain technology with multi-robot systems can enhance decentralized collaboration, improve operational efficiency, and support pandemic response efforts like COVID-19 through monitoring, disinfection, and delivery tasks.

Contribution

It proposes a conceptual framework combining blockchain and multi-robot collaboration to improve decentralization, autonomy, and trust in pandemic-related applications.

Findings

Blockchain can facilitate secure, decentralized multi-robot coordination.

The framework supports monitoring, disinfection, and delivery in pandemic scenarios.

Challenges and opportunities of blockchain-robot-IoT integration are discussed.

Abstract

This conceptual paper overviews how blockchain technology is involving the operation of multi-robot collaboration for combating COVID-19 and future pandemics. Robots are a promising technology for providing many tasks such as spraying, disinfection, cleaning, treating, detecting high body temperature/mask absence, and delivering goods and medical supplies experiencing an epidemic COVID-19. For combating COVID-19, many heterogeneous and homogenous robots are required to perform different tasks for supporting different purposes in the quarantine area. Controlling and decentralizing multi-robot play a vital role in combating COVID-19 by reducing human interaction, monitoring, delivering goods. Blockchain technology can manage multi-robot collaboration in a decentralized fashion, improve the interaction among them to exchange information, share representation, share goals, and trust. We highlight the challenges and provide the tactical solutions enabled by integrating blockchain and multi-robot collaboration to combat COVID-19 pandemic. The framework of our conceptual proposed can increase the intelligence, decentralization, and autonomous operations of connected multi-robot collaboration in the blockchain network. We overview blockchain potential benefits to defining a framework of multi-robot collaboration applications to combat COVID-19 epidemics such as monitoring and outdoor and hospital End to End (E2E) delivery systems. Furthermore, we discuss the challenges and opportunities of integrated blockchain, multi-robot collaboration, and the Internet of Things (IoT) for combating COVID-19 and future pandemics.