Abstract
Common knowledge in a group of robots, i.e., the knowledge known by everyone or nearly everyone, can significantly promote the efficiency of robot collaboration. In a decentralized environment, it can be achieved through blockchain technology. However, traditional blockchain platforms such as Ethereum are based on Proof of Work (PoW), which requires huge amounts of computation and is not suitable for robots with limited computing resources. And the lack of a stable, fully-connected network will greatly reduce the performance of the traditional blockchain technology as well. To address these challenges, we propose a novel peer-to-peer knowledge sharing approach for mobile robot swarms in this paper. This approach is based on hashgraph, a distributed ledger technology that uses directed acyclic graphs to achieve consensus and does not need huge computational power. We also enhance hashgraph to adapt it to the mobile network environment with a limited communication range for each robot and dynamic network topology in the swarm. With a set of motivated scenarios of collective decision making, we verified the effectiveness of our approach and the results show that our approach helps robot swarm collaborate more efficiently with less computation and waste of resources than the approach based on the traditional blockchain.
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Acknowledgments
This work is partially supported by the major Science and Technology Innovation 2030 “New Generation Artificial Intelligence” project 2020AAA0104803 and Scientific Research Plan of National University of Defense Technology under Grant No. ZK-20-38.
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Shu, X., Ding, B., Luo, J., Fu, X., Xie, M., Li, Z. (2021). A Hashgraph-Based Knowledge Sharing Approach for Mobile Robot Swarm. In: Gao, H., Wang, X. (eds) Collaborative Computing: Networking, Applications and Worksharing. CollaborateCom 2021. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 407. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92638-0_10
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