The Intersection of AI, Robotics, and Blockchain Technologies

The class "Futuring and Innovations" led by Professor Amy Harding in the Colorado Technical University Doctoral in Computer Science program necessitates the creation of a blog for a major part of the coursework. The blog will focus on the intersection of machine learning, robotics, and blockchain technology to understand the elements of these technologies that are being applied in interdisciplinary settings. One example of this intersection would be the use of blockchain technology to keep track of the data within a drone swarm (Ferrer, 2018). This intersection would be particularly useful for each field for multiple reasons. One benefit of utilizing these technologies in tandem would be to establish a byzantine fault tolerance for machine learning taking place at the individual and swarm setting (Strobel et al., 2018).

When there is a collective decision making scenario, the variables have to be analyzed on the individual and swarm level simultaneously, and in those calculations the swarm can estimate if an individual node is contributing corrupted information by comparing it against the information submitted by the rest of the swarm (Strobel et al., 2018). An example of this would be if 99 of the drones in a swarm were indicating a wind speed of 8 mph while 4 drones indicated various wind speeds, the collective analysis of the wind speed would have the swarm data over-ride the single individual corrupt data when making calculations about moving the swarm (Strobel et al, 2018). This type of disagreement within a swarm could potentially become a vector for a malicious attack, and this is where the blockchain byzantine fault tolerance becomes an important element of protecting the integrity of the information being processed (Strobel et al, 2018).

While there have been many promises made about the usefulness of blockchain technology, there have been few areas where the technology has proved to be as useful as has been claimed. In this blog, the research will attempt to put forth concrete examples of areas where the technology has shown promise as to inform future ideas about adoption and whether blockchain technology has real potential use cases.

References:

Dinh, T. N., & Thai, M. T. (2018). Ai and blockchain: A disruptive integration. Computer, 51(9), 48-53.

Ferrer, E. C. (2018, November). The blockchain: a new framework for robotic swarm systems. In Proceedings of the Future Technologies Conference (pp. 1037-1058). Springer, Cham.

Lopes, V., & Alexandre, L. A. (2018). An overview of blockchain integration with robotics and artificial intelligence. arXiv preprint arXiv:1810.00329.

Strobel, V., Castelló Ferrer, E., & Dorigo, M. (2018, July). Managing byzantine robots via blockchain technology in a swarm robotics collective decision making scenario. In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (pp. 541-549). International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems.