Robonomics as a Blockchain-based Platform for Unmanned Traffic Management of Mobile Vehicles

Abstract

The article describes the concept of a decentralized architecture of a traffic management system for mobile vehicles and is a continuation of the results presented in the previous article “Blockchain-based protocol of autonomous business activity for multi-agent systems consisting of UAVs.. Robonomic protocol is the basis for the system architecture - a combination of the decentralized Ethereum computer, the IPFS distributed file system, Robot Operating System and market mechanisms. In particular, its focused on the principle of communication between nodes of the traffic management system and the stages of the unmanned mission. As a proof of concept, two experiments on the integration of the proposed architecture are presented: air quality measurements using unmanned aerial systems (UAS) and water quality measurements using unmanned surface vessels (USV). Our work demonstrates that distributed ledger and smart contracts technologies are applicable to the traffic management system and increases the transparency and immutability of the data.