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Managing Collaboration in Heterogeneous Swarms of Robots with Blockchains
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Abstract
One of the key challenges in the collaboration within heterogeneous multi-robot systems is the optimization of the amount and type of data to be shared between robots with different sensing capabilities and computational resources. In this paper, we present a novel approach to managing collaboration terms in heterogeneous multi-robot systems with blockchain technology. Leveraging the extensive research of consensus algorithms in the blockchain domain, we exploit key technologies in this field to be integrated for consensus in robotic systems. We propose the utilization of proof of work systems to have an online estimation of the available computational resources at different robots. Furthermore, we define smart contracts that integrate information about the environment from different robots in order to evaluate and rank the quality and accuracy of each of the robots' sensor data. This means that the key parameters involved in heterogeneous robotic collaboration (computational resources and sensing capabilities) are integrated within the Blockchain and estimated at all robots equally without explicitly sharing information about the robots' hardware or sensors. Trustability is based on the verification of data samples that are submitted to the blockchain within each data exchange transaction, and validated by other robots operating in the same environment.
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Cooperative behaviors in multi-robot systems emerge as an excellent alternative for collaboration in search and rescue tasks to accelerate the finding survivors process and avoid risking additional lives. Although there are still several challenges to be solved, such as communication between agents, power autonomy, navigation strategies, and detection and classification of survivors, among others. The research work presented by this paper focuses on the navigation of the robot swarm and the consensus of the agents applied to the victims detection. The navigation strategy is based on the application of particle swarm theory, where the robots are the agents of the swarm. The attraction and repulsion forces that are typical in swarm particle systems are used by the multi-robot system to avoid obstacles, keep group compact and navigate to a target location. The victims are detected by each agent separately, however, once the agents agree on the existence of a possible victim, these agents separate from the general swarm by creating a sub-swarm. The sub-swarm agents use a modified rendezvous consensus algorithm to perform a formation control around the possible victims and then carry out a consensus of the information acquired by the sensors with the aim to determine the victim existence. Several experiments were conducted to test navigation, obstacle avoidance, and search for victims. Additionally, different situations were simulated with the consensus algorithm. The results show how swarm theory allows the multi-robot system navigates avoiding obstacles, finding possible victims, and settling down their possible use in search and rescue operations.
The development of autonomous vehicles or advanced driving assistance platforms has had a great leap forward getting closer to human daily life over the last decade. Nevertheless, it is still challenging to achieve an efficient and fully autonomous vehicle or driving assistance platform due to many strict requirements and complex situations or unknown environments. One of the main remaining challenges is a robust situational awareness in autonomous vehicles in unknown environments. An autonomous system with a poor situation awareness due to low quantity or quality of data may directly or indirectly cause serious consequences. For instance, a person's life might be at risk due to a delay caused by a long or incorrect path planning of an autonomous ambulance. Internet of Everything (IoE) is currently becoming a prominent technology for many applications such as automation. In this paper, we propose an IoE-based architecture consisting of a heterogeneous team of cars and drones for enhancing situational awareness in autonomous cars, especially when dealing with critical cases of natural disasters. In particular, we show how an autonomous car can plan in advance the possible paths to a given destination, and send orders to other vehicles. These, in turn, perform terrain reconnaissance for avoiding obstacles and dealing with difficult situations. Together with a map merging algorithm deployed into the team, the proposed architecture can help to save traveling distance and time significantly in case of complex scenarios.
Sequential Decision Making Problems (SDMPs) that can be modeled as Markov Decision Processes can be solved using methods that combine Dynamic Programming (DP) and Reinforcement Learning (RL). Depending on the problem scenarios and the available Decision Makers (DMs), such RL algorithms may be designed for single-agent systems or multi-agent systems that either consist of agents with individual goals and decision making capabilities, which are influenced by other agent’s decisions, or behave as a swarm of agents that collaboratively learn a single objective. Many studies have been conducted in this area; however, when concentrating on available swarm RL algorithms, one obtains a clear view of the areas that still require attention. Most of the studies in this area focus on homogeneous swarms and so far, systems introduced as Heterogeneous Swarms (HetSs) merely include very few, i.e., two or three sub-swarms of homogeneous agents, which either, according to their capabilities, deal with a specific sub-problem of the general problem or exhibit different behaviors in order to reduce the risk of bias. This study introduces a novel approach that allows agents, which are originally designed to solve different problems and hence have higher degrees of heterogeneity, to behave as a swarm when addressing identical sub-problems. In fact, the affinity between two agents, which measures the compatibility of agents to work together towards solving a specific sub-problem, is used in designing a Heterogeneous Swarm RL (HetSRL) algorithm that allows HetSs to solve the intended SDMPs.
The past decade has witnessed the rapid evolution in blockchain technologies, which has attracted tremendous interests from both the research communities and industries. The blockchain network was originated from the Internet financial sector as a decentralized, immutable ledger system for transactional data ordering. Nowadays, it is envisioned as a powerful backbone/framework for decentralized data processing and data-driven self-organization in flat, open-access networks. In particular, the plausible characteristics of decentralization, immutability, and self-organization are primarily owing to the unique decentralized consensus mechanisms introduced by blockchain networks. This survey is motivated by the lack of a comprehensive literature review on the development of decentralized consensus mechanisms in blockchain networks. In this paper, we provide a systematic vision of the organization of blockchain networks. By emphasizing the unique characteristics of decentralized consensus in blockchain networks, our in-depth review of the state-of-the-art consensus protocols is focused on both the perspective of distributed consensus system design and the perspective of incentive mechanism design. From a game-theoretic point of view, we also provide a thorough review of the strategy adopted for self-organization by the individual nodes in the blockchain backbone networks. Consequently, we provide a comprehensive survey of the emerging applications of blockchain networks in a broad area of telecommunication. We highlight our special interest in how the consensus mechanisms impact these applications. Finally, we discuss several open issues in the protocol design for blockchain consensus and the related potential research directions.
Designing a secure permissionless distributed ledger (blockchain) that performs on par with centralized payment processors, such as Visa, is a challenging task. Most existing distributed ledgers are unable to scale-out, i.e., to grow their total processing capacity with the number of validators; and those that do, compromise security or decentralization. We present OmniLedger, a novel scale-out distributed ledger that preserves longterm security under permissionless operation. It ensures security and correctness by using a bias-resistant public-randomness protocol for choosing large, statistically representative shards that process transactions, and by introducing an efficient cross-shard commit protocol that atomically handles transactions affecting multiple shards. OmniLedger also optimizes performance via parallel intra-shard transaction processing, ledger pruning via collectively-signed state blocks, and low-latency "trust-but-verify" validation for low-value transactions. An evaluation of our experimental prototype shows that OmniLedger's throughput scales linearly in the number of active validators, supporting Visa-level workloads and beyond, while confirming typical transactions in under two seconds.
While swarm robotics systems are often claimed to be highly fault-tolerant, so far research has limited its attention to safe laboratory settings and has virtually ignored security issues in the presence of Byzantine robots-i.e., robots with arbitrarily faulty or malicious behavior. However, in many applications one or more Byzantine robots may suffice to let current swarm coordination mechanisms fail with unpredictable or disastrous outcomes. In this paper, we provide a proof-of-concept for managing security issues in swarm robotics systems via blockchain technology. Our approach uses decentralized programs executed via blockchain technology (blockchain-based smart contracts) to establish secure swarm coordination mechanisms and to identify and exclude Byzantine swarm members. We studied the performance of our blockchain-based approach in a collective decision-making scenario both in the presence and absence of Byzantine robots and compared our results to those obtained with an existing collective decision approach. The results show a clear advantage of the blockchain approach when Byzantine robots are part of the swarm.
The electricity that is expended in the process of mining Bitcoin has become a topic of heavy debate over the past few years. It is a process that makes Bitcoin extremely energy-hungry by design, as the currency requires a huge amount of hash calculations for its ultimate goal of processing financial transactions without intermediaries (peer-to-peer). The primary fuel for each of these calculations is electricity. The Bitcoin network can be estimated to consume at least 2.55 gigawatts of electricity currently, and potentially 7.67 gigawatts in the future, making it comparable with countries such as Ireland (3.1 gigawatts) and Austria (8.2 gigawatts). Economic models tell us that Bitcoin’s electricity consumption will gravitate toward the latter number. A look at Bitcoin miner production estimates suggests that this number could already be reached in 2018.
In recent years, there has been a growing interest in designing multi-robot systems (hereafter MRSs) to provide cost effective, fault-tolerant and reliable solutions to a variety of automated applications. Here, we review recent advancements in MRSs specifically designed for cooperative object transport, which requires the members of MRSs to coordinate their actions to transport objects from a starting position to a final destination. To achieve cooperative object transport, a wide range of transport, coordination and control strategies have been proposed. Our goal is to provide a comprehensive summary for this relatively heterogeneous and fast-growing body of scientific literature. While distilling the information, we purposefully avoid using hierarchical dichotomies, which have been traditionally used in the field of MRSs. Instead, we employ a coarse-grain approach by classifying each study based on the transport strategy used; pushing-only, grasping and caging. We identify key design constraints that may be shared among these studies despite considerable differences in their design methods. In the end, we discuss several open challenges and possible directions for future work to improve the performance of the current MRSs. Overall, we hope to increase the visibility and accessibility of the excellent studies in the field and provide a framework that helps the reader to navigate through them more effectively.
The blockchain technology is a relatively new approach in the field of information technologies. As one of its first implementations, bitcoin as a cryptocurrency has gained a lot of attention. Together with Ethereum, blockchain implementation with focus on smart contracts, they represent the very core of modern cryptocurrency development. This paper is meant to give a brief introduction to these topics.
Thanks to its potential in many applications, Blockchain has recently been nominated as one of the technologies exciting intense attention. Blockchain has solved the problem of changing the original low-trust centralized ledger held by a single third-party, to a high-trust decentralized form held by different entities, or in other words, verifying nodes. The key contribution of the work of Blockchain is the consensus algorithm, which decides how agreement is made to append a new block between all nodes in the verifying network. Blockchain algorithms can be categorized into two main groups. The first group is proof-based consensus, which requires the nodes joining the verifying network to show that they are more qualified than the others to do the appending work. The second group is voting-based consensus, which requires nodes in the network to exchange their results of verifying a new block or transaction, before making the final decision. In this paper, we present a review of the Blockchain consensus algorithms that have been researched and that are being applied in some well-known applications at this time.
Since its inception, the blockchain technology has shown promising application prospects. From the initial cryptocurrency to the current smart contract, blockchain has been applied to many fields. Although there are some studies on the security and privacy issues of blockchain, there lacks a systematic examination on the security of blockchain systems. In this paper, we conduct a systematic study on the security threats to blockchain and survey the corresponding real attacks by examining popular blockchain systems. We also review the security enhancement solutions for blockchain, which could be used in the development of various blockchain systems, and suggest some future directions to stir research efforts into this area.
Blockchain, the foundation of Bitcoin, has received extensive attentions recently. Blockchain serves as an immutable ledger which allows transactions take place in a decentralized manner. Blockchain-based applications are springing up, covering numerous fields including financial services, reputation system and Internet of Things (IoT), and so on. However, there are still many challenges of blockchain technology such as scalability and security problems waiting to be overcome. This paper presents a comprehensive overview on blockchain technology. We provide an overview of blockchain architechture firstly and compare some typical consensus algorithms used in different blockchains. Furthermore, technical challenges and recent advances are briefly listed. We also lay out possible future trends for blockchain.
We discuss the forging algorithm of Nxt from a probabilistic point of view, and obtain explicit formulas and estimates for several important quantities, such as the probability that an account generates a block, the length of the longest sequence of consecutive blocks generated by one account, and the probability that one concurrent blockchain wins over an- other one. Also, we discuss some attack vectors related to splitting an account into many smaller ones.
We study decentralized cryptocurrency protocols in which the participants do not deplete physical scarce resources. Such protocols commonly rely on Proof of Stake, i.e., on mechanisms that extend voting power to the stakeholders of the system. We offer analysis of existing protocols that have a substantial amount of popularity. We then present our novel pure Proof of Stake protocols, and argue that they help in mitigating problems that the existing protocols exhibit.
Bitcoin is a distributed digital currency which has attracted a substan- tial number of users. We perform an in-depth investigation to understand what made Bitcoin so successful, while decades of research on cryptographic e-cash has not lead to a large-scale deployment. We ask also how Bitcoin could become a good candidate for a long-lived stable currency. In doing so, we identify several issues and attacks of Bitcoin, and we propose novel techniques to address them.
We report on recent work in which we employed artificial evolution to design neural network controllers for small, homogeneous teams of mobile autonomous robots. The robots were evolved to perform a formation-movement task from random starting positions, equipped only with infrared sensors. The dual constraints of homogeneity and minimal sensors make this a non-trivial task. We describe the behaviour of a successful system in which robots adopt and maintain functionally distinct roles in order to achieve the task. We believe this to be the first example of the use of artificial evolution to design coordinated, cooperative behaviour for real robots.
In this paper, we discuss the self-assembling capabilities of the swarm-bot, a distributed robotics concept that lies at the intersection between collective and self-reconfigurable robotics. A swarm-bot is comprised of autonomous mobile robots called s-bots. S-bots can either act independently or self-assemble into a swarm-bot by using their grippers. We report on experiments in which we study the process that leads a group of s-bots to self-assemble. In particular, we present results of experiments in which we vary the number of s-bots (up to 16 physical robots), their starting configurations, and the properties of the terrain on which self-assembly takes place. In view of the very successful experimental results, swarm-bot qualifies as the current state of the art in autonomous self-assembly
The MARTHA project objectives are the control and the management
of a fleet of autonomous mobile robots for transshipment tasks in
harbors, airports and marshalling yards. One of the most challenging and
key problems of the MARTHA project is multi-robot cooperation. A general
concept for the control of a large fleet of autonomous mobile robots has
been developed, implemented and validated in the framework of the MARTHA
project. This is the first study in the autonomous mobile robot field to
add multi-robot cooperation capabilities to such a large fleet of robots
Introduction Teams of robotic systems at first glance might appear to be more trouble than they are worth. Why not simply build one robot that is capable of doing everything we need? There are several reasons why two robots (or more) can be better than one: ffl Distributed Action: Many robots can be in many places at the same time ffl Inherent Parallelism: Many robots can do many, perhaps different things at the same time ffl Divide and Conquer: Certain problems are well suited for decomposition and allocation among many robots ffl Simpler is better: Often each agent in a team of robots can be simpler than a more comprehensive single robot solution No doubt there are more reasons as well. Unfortunately there are also drawbacks, in particular regarding coordination and elimination of interference. The degree of difficulty imposed depends heavily upon the task and the communication and control strategies chosen
This paper describes a new replication algorithm that is able to tolerate Byzantine faults. We believe that Byzantinefault -tolerant algorithms will be increasingly important in the future because malicious attacks and software errors are increasingly common and can cause faulty nodes to exhibit arbitrary behavior. Whereas previous algorithms assumed a synchronous system or were too slow to be used in practice, the algorithm described in this paper is practical: it works in asynchronous environments like the Internet and incorporates several important optimizations that improve the response time of previous algorithms by more than an order of magnitude. We implemented a Byzantine-fault-tolerant NFS service using our algorithm and measured its performance. The results show that our service is only 3% slower than a standard unreplicated NFS. 1 Introduction Malicious attacks and software errors are increasingly common. The growing reliance of industry and government on online information...
As an emerging decentralized architecture and distributed computing paradigm underlying Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, blockchain has attracted intensive attention in both research and applications in recent years. The key advantage of this technology lies in the fact that it enables the establishment of secured, trusted, and decentralized autonomous ecosystems for various scenarios, especially for better usage of the legacy devices, infrastructure, and resources. In this paper, we presented a systematic investigation of blockchain and cryptocurrencies. Related fundamental rationales, technical advantages, existing and potential ecosystems of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are discussed, and a six-layer reference model of the blockchain framework is proposed with detailed description for each of its six layers. Potential applications of blockchain and cryptocurrencies are also addressed. Our aim here is to provide guidance and reference for future research along this promising and important direction. IEEE
The Bitcoin cryptocurrency records its transactions in a public log called the blockchain. Its security rests critically on the distributed protocol that maintains the blockchain, run by participants called miners. Conventional wisdom asserts that the mining protocol is incentive-compatible and secure against colluding minority groups, that is, it incentivizes miners to follow the protocol as prescribed.
We show that the Bitcoin mining protocol is not incentive-compatible. We present an attack with which colluding miners' revenue is larger than their fair share. The attack can have significant consequences for Bitcoin: Rational miners will prefer to join the attackers, and the colluding group will increase in size until it becomes a majority. At this point, the Bitcoin system ceases to be a decentralized currency.
Unless certain assumptions are made, selfish mining may be feasible for any coalition size of colluding miners. We propose a practical modification to the Bitcoin protocol that protects Bitcoin in the general case. It prohibits selfish mining by a coalition that command less than 1/4 of the resources. This threshold is lower than the wrongly assumed 1/2 bound, but better than the current reality where a coalition of any size can compromise the system.
Fabric is a modular and extensible open-source system for deploying and operating permissioned blockchains and one of the Hyperledger projects hosted by the Linux Foundation (www.hyperledger.org).
Fabric is the first truly extensible blockchain system for running distributed applications. It supports modular consensus protocols, which allows the system to be tailored to particular use cases and trust models. Fabric is also the first blockchain system that runs distributed applications written in standard, general-purpose programming languages, without systemic dependency on a native cryptocurrency. This stands in sharp contrast to existing block-chain platforms that require "smart-contracts" to be written in domain-specific languages or rely on a cryptocurrency. Fabric realizes the permissioned model using a portable notion of membership, which may be integrated with industry-standard identity management. To support such flexibility, Fabric introduces an entirely novel blockchain design and revamps the way blockchains cope with non-determinism, resource exhaustion, and performance attacks.
This paper describes Fabric, its architecture, the rationale behind various design decisions, its most prominent implementation aspects, as well as its distributed application programming model. We further evaluate Fabric by implementing and benchmarking a Bitcoin-inspired digital currency. We show that Fabric achieves end-to-end throughput of more than 3500 transactions per second in certain popular deployment configurations, with sub-second latency, scaling well to over 100 peers.
For numerous applications, it is essential to reliably link a public key with its owner. The current solution is to employ the well-known Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), represented by a trusted certificate authority (CA), to fulfil this assignment by signing the certificate for the public key after validating its owner. However, due to the centralized architecture, it raises the single-point failure problem with unpredictable threats. In this paper, we present a distributed certificate scheme, referred to as Cecoin which is inspired by the well-known Bitcoin by employing its irreversible unforgeability and public verifiability. In Cecoin, the certificates can be treated as currencies and recorded on block chain, which removes the single point failure problem. The miners can verify the validity of certificates following a set of rules to ensure ownership consistency, and allow an identity to bind multiple public-key certificates. For efficient retrieval and verification of certificates, and quick operations, we incorporate the modified Merkle Patricia tree and employ it to implement a distributed Certificate Library. To allow the owner to transfer the possession of identity, we design an online fair exchange protocol without a trusted third party. Security and efficiency analyses show that our Cecoin provides strong security with desirable efficiency.
In this paper we introduce a game-theoretic model for reward functions in Bitcoin mining pools. Our model consists only of an unordered history of reported shares and gives participating miners the strategy choices of either reporting or delaying when they discover a share or full solution. We defined a precise condition for incentive compatibility to ensure miners strategy choices optimize the welfare of the pool as a whole. With this definition we show that proportional mining rewards are not incentive compatible in this model. We introduce and analyze a novel reward function which is incentive compatible in this model. Finally we show that the popular reward function pay-per-last-N-shares is also incentive compatible in a more general model.
Learn how to use Solidity and the Ethereum project – second only to Bitcoin in market capitalization. Blockchain protocols are taking the world by storm, and the Ethereum project, with its Turing-complete scripting language Solidity, has rapidly become a front-runner. This book presents the blockchain phenomenon in context; then situates Ethereum in a world pioneered by Bitcoin.
See why professionals and non-professionals alike are honing their skills in smart contract patterns and distributed application development. You'll review the fundamentals of programming and networking, alongside its introduction to the new discipline of crypto-economics. You'll then deploy smart contracts of your own, and learn how they can serve as a back-end for JavaScript and HTML applications on the Web.
Many Solidity tutorials out there today have the same flaw: they are written for“advanced” JavaScript developers who want to transfer their skills to a blockchain environment. Introducing Ethereum and Solidity is accessible to technology professionals and enthusiasts of “all levels.” You’ll find exciting sample code that can move forward real world assets in both the academic and the corporate arenas. Find out now why this book is a powerful gateway for creative technologists of all types, from concept to deployment.
In this paper, we mainly review the topics in consensus and coordination of multi-agent systems (MASs) which have received a tremendous surge of interest and progressed rapidly in the past few years. Focusing on different kinds of constraints on the controller and the selfdynamics of each individual agent, as well as the coordination schemes, we categorize the recent results into the following directions: consensus with constraints, eventbased consensus, consensus over signed networks, and consensus of heterogeneous agents. We also review some applications of the very well developed consensus algorithms to the topics such as economic dispatch problem in smart grid and k-means clustering algorithms.
Cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin and 250 similar alt-coins, embody at their core a blockchain protocol --- a mechanism for a distributed network of computational nodes to periodically agree on a set of new transactions. Designing a secure blockchain protocol relies on an open challenge in security, that of designing a highly-scalable agreement protocol open to manipulation by byzantine or arbitrarily malicious nodes. Bitcoin's blockchain agreement protocol exhibits security, but does not scale: it processes 3--7 transactions per second at present, irrespective of the available computation capacity at hand.
In this paper, we propose a new distributed agreement protocol for permission-less blockchains called ELASTICO. ELASTICO scales transaction rates almost linearly with available computation for mining: the more the computation power in the network, the higher the number of transaction blocks selected per unit time. ELASTICO is efficient in its network messages and tolerates byzantine adversaries of up to one-fourth of the total computational power. Technically, ELASTICO uniformly partitions or parallelizes the mining network (securely) into smaller committees, each of which processes a disjoint set of transactions (or "shards"). While sharding is common in non-byzantine settings, ELASTICO is the first candidate for a secure sharding protocol with presence of byzantine adversaries. Our scalability experiments on Amazon EC2 with up to $1, 600$ nodes confirm ELASTICO's theoretical scaling properties.
Bitcoin cryptocurrency demonstrated the utility of global consensus across thousands of nodes, changing the world of digital transactions forever. In the early days of Bitcoin, the performance of its probabilistic proof-of-work (PoW) based consensus fabric, also known as blockchain, was not a major issue. Bitcoin became a success story, despite its consensus latencies on the order of an hour and the theoretical peak throughput of only up to 7 transactions per second.
The situation today is radically different and the poor performance scalability of early PoW blockchains no longer makes sense. Specifically, the trend of modern cryptocurrency platforms, such as Ethereum, is to support execution of arbitrary distributed applications on blockchain fabric, needing much better performance. This approach, however, makes cryptocurrency platforms step away from their original purpose and enter the domain of database-replication protocols, notably, the classical state-machine replication, and in particular its Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) variants.
In this paper, we contrast PoW-based blockchains to those based on BFT state machine replication, focusing on their scalability limits. We also discuss recent proposals to overcoming these scalability limits and outline key outstanding open problems in the quest for the “ultimate” blockchain fabric(s).
An implicit goal of Bitcoin's reward structure is to diffuse network influence over a diverse, decentralized population of individual participants. Indeed, Bitcoin's security claims rely on no single entity wielding a sufficiently large portion of the network's overall computational power. Unfortunately, rather than participating independently, most Bitcoin miners join coalitions called mining pools in which a central pool administrator largely directs the pool's activity, leading to a consolidation of power. Recently, the largest mining pool has accounted for more than half of network's total mining capacity. Relatedly, "hosted mining" service providers offer their clients the benefit of economies-of-scale, tempting them away from independent participation. We argue that the prevalence of mining coalitions is due to a limitation of the Bitcoin proof-of-work puzzle -- specifically, that it affords an effective mechanism for enforcing cooperation in a coalition. We present several definitions and constructions for "nonoutsourceable" puzzles that thwart such enforcement mechanisms, thereby deterring coalitions. We also provide an implementation and benchmark results for our schemes to show they are practical.
This study deals with an underexplored area of the emerging technologies debate: Robotics in the healthcare setting. The author explores the role of care and develops a value-sensitive ethical framework for the eventual employment of care robots. Highlighting the range of positive and negative aspects associated with the initiative to design and use care robots, it draws out essential content as a guide to future design both reinforcing this study’s contemporary relevance, and giving weight to its prescriptions. The book speaks to, and is meant to be read by, a range of disciplines from science and engineering to philosophers and ethicists.
This article provides an overview of worldwide development and current status of precision-agriculture technologies based on literatures generated mainly during the past years. The topics include natural-resource variability; variability management; management zone; impact of precision-agriculture technologies on farm profitability and environment; engineering innovations; information management; worldwide application and adoption trend of precision-agriculture technologies; and potentials of the technologies in modernizing the agriculture in the world. A brief review of research in agricultural vehicle guidance technologies is presented. Application of new popular robotic technologies will augment the realization of agricultural vehicle in future. Agricultural Robotics is the logical proliferation of automation technology into bio systems such as agriculture, forestry, green house, horticulture etc. Presently a number of researches are being done to increase their applications. Some of the scientist contributions are mobile robot, flying robot, forester robot, Demeter which are exclusively used for agriculture. A brief discussion is being done about the types of robots which increase the accuracy and precision of the agriculture.
In this paper, we study the problem of multi-robot target searching in unknown environments. For target searching, robots need an efficient method with respect to their limitations and characteristics of the workspace. Every robotic search algorithm has several constraints. Our goal is to propose a distributed algorithm based on Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) for target searching which satisfies the before-mentioned constraints. This extension of PSO is named A-RPSO (Adaptive Robotic PSO). A-RPSO acts as the controlling mechanism for robots. It is similar to PSO with two modifications: firstly it takes into account obstacle avoidance, secondly A-RPSO has a mechanism to escape from local optima. Various experimental results obtained in a simulated environment, show that A-RPSO is able to outperform other state of-the-art techniques in target searching problems. The performance of A-RPSO is much more significant compared with other approaches in two distinctive states particularly: large environments and small number of robots.
The neural network ensemble (NNE) is a very effective way to obtain a good prediction performance by combining the outputs of several independently trained neural networks. Swarm intelligence is applied here to model the population of interacting agents or swarms that are able to self-organize. In this paper, we combine NNE and multi-population swarm intelligence to construct our improved neural network ensemble (INNE). First, each component forward neural network (FNN) is optimized by chaotic particle swarm optimization (CPSO) and gradient gescending (GD) algorithm. Second, in contrast to most existing NNE training algorithm, we adopt multiple obviously different populations to construct swarm intelligence. As an example, one population is trained by particle swarm optimization (PSO) and the others are trained by differential evolution (DE) or artificial bee colony algorithm (ABC). The ensemble weights are trained by multi-population co-evolution PSO–ABC–DE chaotic searching algorithm (M-PSO–ABC–DE–CS). Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed novel INNE algorithm is superior to existing popular NNE in function prediction.
A peer-to-peer crypto-currency design derived from Satoshi Nakamoto's Bitcoin. Proof-of-stake replaces proof-of-work to provide most of the network security. Under this hybrid design proof-of-work mainly provides initial minting and is largely non-essential in the long run. Security level of the network is not dependent on energy consumption in the long term thus providing an energy-efficient and more cost-competitive peer-to-peer crypto-currency. Proof-of-stake is based on coin age and generated by each node via a hashing scheme bearing similarity to Bitcoin's but over limited search space. Block chain history and transaction settlement are further protected by a centrally broadcasted checkpoint mechanism.
A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution. Digital signatures provide part of the solution, but the main benefits are lost if a trusted third party is still required to prevent double-spending. We propose a solution to the double-spending problem using a peer-to-peer network. The network timestamps transactions by hashing them into an ongoing chain of hash-based proof-of-work, forming a record that cannot be changed without redoing the proof-of-work. The longest chain not only serves as proof of the sequence of events witnessed, but proof that it came from the largest pool of CPU power. As long as a majority of CPU power is controlled by nodes that are not cooperating to attack the network, they'll generate the longest chain and outpace attackers. The network itself requires minimal structure. Messages are broadcast on a best effort basis, and nodes can leave and rejoin the network at will, accepting the longest proof-of-work chain as proof of what happened while they were gone.
We present a computational technique for combatting junk mail, in particular, and controlling access to a shared resource, in general. The main idea is to require a user to compute a moderately hard, but not intractable, function in order to gain access to the resource, thus preventing frivolous use. To this end we suggest several pricing functions, based on, respectively, extracting square roots modulo a prime, the Fiat-Shamir signature scheme, and the Ong-Schnorr-Shamir (cracked) signature scheme.
In this paper we describe the various scoring systems used to calculate
rewards of participants in Bitcoin pooled mining, explain the problems each
were designed to solve and analyze their respective advantages and
disadvantages.
A description is given of the multicomputer architecture for fault
tolerance (MAFT), a distributed system designed to provide extremely
reliable computation in real-time control systems. MAFT is based on the
physical and functional partitioning of executive functions from
applications functions. The implementation of the executive functions in
a special-purpose hardware processor allows the fault-tolerance
functions to be transparent to the application programs and minimizes
overhead. Byzantine agreement and approximate agreement algorithms are
used for critical system parameters. MAFT supports the use of
multiversion hardware and software to tolerate built-in or generic
faults. Graceful degradation and restoration of the application workload
is permitted in response to the exclusion and readmission of nodes,
respectively
End to end learning for self-driving cars
- Mariusz Bojarski
- Davide Del Testa
- Daniel Dworakowski
- Bernhard Firner
- Beat Flepp
- Prasoon Goyal
- D Lawrence
- Mathew Jackel
- Urs Monfort
- Jiakai Muller
- Zhang
Mariusz Bojarski, Davide Del Testa, Daniel Dworakowski, Bernhard
Firner, Beat Flepp, Prasoon Goyal, Lawrence D Jackel, Mathew Monfort, Urs Muller, Jiakai Zhang, et al. End to end learning for self-driving
cars. arXiv preprint arXiv:1604.07316, 2016.
Industry 4.0: The future of productivity and growth in manufacturing industries
- Michael Rüßmann
- Markus Lorenz
- Philipp Gerbert
- Manuela Waldner
- Jan Justus
- Pascal Engel
- Michael Harnisch
Michael Rüßmann, Markus Lorenz, Philipp Gerbert, Manuela Waldner,
Jan Justus, Pascal Engel, and Michael Harnisch. Industry 4.0: The
future of productivity and growth in manufacturing industries. Boston
Consulting Group, 9(1):54-89, 2015.
Kilobot: A low cost scalable robot system for collective behaviors
- Michael Rubenstein
- Christian Ahler
- Radhika Nagpal
Michael Rubenstein, Christian Ahler, and Radhika Nagpal. Kilobot: A
low cost scalable robot system for collective behaviors. In 2012 IEEE
International Conference on Robotics and Automation, pages 3293-3298. IEEE, 2012.
The task allocation model based on reputation for the heterogeneous multi-robot collaboration system
- Zhiguo Shi
- Junming Wei
- Xujian Wei
- Kun Tan
- Zhiliang Wang
Zhiguo Shi, Junming Wei, Xujian Wei, Kun Tan, and Zhiliang Wang.
The task allocation model based on reputation for the heterogeneous
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