Swarm Oracle: Trustless Blockchain Agreements through Robot Swarms

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Pacheco, Alexandre, Zhao, Hanqing, Strobel, Volker, Roukny, Tarik, Dudek, Gregory, Reina, Andreagiovanni, Dorigo, Marco
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Pacheco, Alexandre
Zhao, Hanqing
Strobel, Volker
Roukny, Tarik
Dudek, Gregory
Reina, Andreagiovanni
Dorigo, Marco
author_facet Pacheco, Alexandre
Zhao, Hanqing
Strobel, Volker
Roukny, Tarik
Dudek, Gregory
Reina, Andreagiovanni
Dorigo, Marco
contents Blockchain consensus, rooted in the principle ``don't trust, verify'', limits access to real-world data, which may be ambiguous or inaccessible to some participants. Oracles address this limitation by supplying data to blockchains, but existing solutions may reduce autonomy, transparency, or reintroduce the need for trust. We propose Swarm Oracle: a decentralized network of autonomous robots -- that is, a robot swarm -- that use onboard sensors and peer-to-peer communication to collectively verify real-world data and provide it to smart contracts on public blockchains. Swarm Oracle leverages the built-in decentralization, fault tolerance and mobility of robot swarms, which can flexibly adapt to meet information requests on-demand, even in remote locations. Unlike typical cooperative robot swarms, Swarm Oracle integrates robots from multiple stakeholders, protecting the system from single-party biases but also introducing potential adversarial behavior. To ensure the secure, trustless and global consensus required by blockchains, we employ a Byzantine fault-tolerant protocol that enables robots from different stakeholders to operate together, reaching social agreements of higher quality than the estimates of individual robots. Through extensive experiments using both real and simulated robots, we showcase how consensus on uncertain environmental information can be achieved, despite several types of attacks orchestrated by large proportions of the robots, and how a reputation system based on blockchain tokens lets Swarm Oracle autonomously recover from faults and attacks, a requirement for long-term operation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_15956
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Swarm Oracle: Trustless Blockchain Agreements through Robot Swarms
Pacheco, Alexandre
Zhao, Hanqing
Strobel, Volker
Roukny, Tarik
Dudek, Gregory
Reina, Andreagiovanni
Dorigo, Marco
Robotics
Blockchain consensus, rooted in the principle ``don't trust, verify'', limits access to real-world data, which may be ambiguous or inaccessible to some participants. Oracles address this limitation by supplying data to blockchains, but existing solutions may reduce autonomy, transparency, or reintroduce the need for trust. We propose Swarm Oracle: a decentralized network of autonomous robots -- that is, a robot swarm -- that use onboard sensors and peer-to-peer communication to collectively verify real-world data and provide it to smart contracts on public blockchains. Swarm Oracle leverages the built-in decentralization, fault tolerance and mobility of robot swarms, which can flexibly adapt to meet information requests on-demand, even in remote locations. Unlike typical cooperative robot swarms, Swarm Oracle integrates robots from multiple stakeholders, protecting the system from single-party biases but also introducing potential adversarial behavior. To ensure the secure, trustless and global consensus required by blockchains, we employ a Byzantine fault-tolerant protocol that enables robots from different stakeholders to operate together, reaching social agreements of higher quality than the estimates of individual robots. Through extensive experiments using both real and simulated robots, we showcase how consensus on uncertain environmental information can be achieved, despite several types of attacks orchestrated by large proportions of the robots, and how a reputation system based on blockchain tokens lets Swarm Oracle autonomously recover from faults and attacks, a requirement for long-term operation.
title Swarm Oracle: Trustless Blockchain Agreements through Robot Swarms
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15956