Self-governed access control in open robot swarms using a blockchain-based DAO

Abstract

Robot swarms harness simple, local interactions among many individually limited robots to produce complex, coordinated collective behavior, making them valuable across domains from agriculture to disaster response. We envision the next frontier for such swarms as open swarms, in which robots join or leave the swarm dynamically at runtime. The ability to dynamically adjust swarm size has been shown to be beneficial, for instance by reducing inconsistencies and network partitioning, especially under sparse connectivity or in complex environments, ultimately improving task performance. For practical deployment, however, open swarms requires governance, particularly protection against Byzantine behavior (i.e., faulty or malicious robots), since allowing robots to join freely also makes the swarm easier to infiltrate. Blockchain technology has recently been incorporated into robot swarms, offering secure, decentralized coordination and improved resilience, though largely in closed settings with a fixed, predetermined membership. In this work, we extend these benefits to open swarms by introducing robot swarms governed by a blockchain-based decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), in which the swarm regulates itself using autonomous rules encoded in smart contracts. We outline several DAO-based governance mechanisms for robot swarms, depending on the needs of the application, and present a proof-of-concept implementation of a simple DAO that regulates swarm membership and prevents Byzantine infiltration. Our simulation results and real-robot validations show that DAO-governed access control and robot removal can maintain proper swarm functioning while keeping the number of Byzantine robots within acceptable limits.