Paper title: Proof of location verification towards trustworthy collaborative multi-vendor robotic systems
Authors names: Evan W. Wu*, Marius Jurt§, Ben Holden§, Yichao Jin§
Affiliation: 

* School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK

§ Toshiba-BRIL, Toshiba Europe Ltd., Bristol, UK
Paper abstract:

In the context of a smart industrial manufacturing scenario, where autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) from different manufacturers operate in shared environments, it is important to establish a method for verifying the integrity of the robots. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework for verifying the completion of tasks in multi-vendor robotic systems using proof-of-location and distributed ledger technologies. This approach ensures the trustworthiness and reliability of a multi-vendor robotic system. Using distributed ledger technology (DLT), robots can independently and cryptographically verify the completion of each other's tasks. Unlike traditional solutions that require several dedicated robots to participate in the verification process simultaneously, our proposed physical verification method is more efficient and does not require a typical "mining" stage. Additionally, it can be done asynchronously without adding extra burdens or delays to other ongoing tasks. Simulation results demonstrate that our approach can efficiently and effectively identify malicious robots in a multi-vendor robotic system.