Enhancing Visual Homing in Robotics: A Study on Blockchain Integration and Consensus Algorithms

Abstract

Creating an immutable repository for vital robot and environmental data, ensuring long-term accessibility, and functioning in the absence of GPS or mapping are crucial for visual homing navigation systems. We focus on the intersection of blockchain and robotics, particularly in visual homing. Our research involves an in-depth analysis of various blockchain consensus mechanisms, highlighting their suitability for visual homing applications. The heart of blockchain functionality lies in its consensus mechanism, which facilitates agreement among network nodes. In our first study part, we conduct a comprehensive comparative analysis of key consensus algorithms, emphasizing visual homing's decentralization, fault tolerance, latency, and throughput requirements. This analysis serves as a valuable reference for researchers and developers, emphasizing the importance of aligning the chosen consensus mechanism with specific blockchain application needs. The second part of our work involves extensive experiments exploring the connection between blockchain and visual homing. We assess prominent consensus mechanisms like Proof of Work (PoW), Proof of Stake (PoS), Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS), and Proof of Authority (PoA) within a virtual environment in Gazebo, leveraging Wide Area Visual Navigation (WAVN). Our research implementation is grounded in the ROS framework and the Gazebo simulation environment.