Decentralized Mobile Robot Collaboration in Multi-Vendor Contexts: Service Robot Crowdsourcing via Distributed Ledger Technology

The collaboration among service robots operated by multiple vendors is in demand, but it is difficult to achieve due to issues such as the lack of interoperability among vendor-specific operating systems. To tackle this problem, we propose a crowdsourcing platform leveraging distributed ledger technology (DLT), where users can request services by flexibly combining multiple tasks assigned to robots. We also present a solution to avoid collisions of mobile robots by employing a universal space identification technology, called Spatial-ID, and defining a Space of Attention (SoA) as a location that requires attention for navigating robots. Our approach does not require the sharing of navigation maps among vendors unlike conventional methods. As a case study, we compared the transaction approval latency of the Ethereum blockchain and IOTA Tangle using their test networks through computer simulations. We then evaluated the risk of transaction conflicts, concluding that IOTA Tangle is a promising technology for implementing the proposed platform.