A Survey on Blockchain in Robotics: Issues, Opportunities, Challenges and Future Directions

Robotics is the multi-disciplinary domain that is booming in today’s world, and expanding its roots deep into various fields of research, manufacturing industries, healthcare, and even in our day-to-day lives. Nevertheless, as with any other evolving technology, robotics face numerous challenges. In this context, lately, blockchain technology has been identified as a promising technology to resolve many of these issues such as identification of malicious/rogue nodes, malfunctioning/faults in automated processes, non-compliance to the agreed norms and privacy rules, security attacks on robotic systems, and non-transparency in performance monitoring and audits. In particular, blockchain with its features like decentrality, immutability, provenance, low operational cost, tight access control, and trustworthy operations, can offer significant improvements to new applications and use cases driven by robotics. Thus, the paper begins with exploring the key requirements and technical challenges encountered by robots in general. Next, it provides detailed overview of blockchain technology in a tutorial style. Then, the role of blockchain for different uses cases of robotics are surveyed. Furthermore, various technical challenges that need to be mitigated to harness full potential of blockchain for robotics are highlighted. Finally, the future research directions are presented that can pave the way ahead for advancements and profitable integration of blockchain in the realm of robotics.