Blockchain-Enabled Trust Management for Autonomous Multi-Robot Systems

Abstract

Autonomous multi-robot and swarm-robotic systems must coordinate action among many physically separated units, and that
coordination breaks down if any participant can misreport its state or sensed data without consequence. This article
synthesizes the growing literature on using blockchain technology to make multi-robot trust management decentralized and
tamper-evident rather than dependent on a single trusted coordinator. We trace the problem from pre-blockchain trust and
reputation research in wireless sensor networks and mobile ad hoc networks, through the foundational distributed-systems
consensus work that gives blockchain its Byzantine fault tolerance guarantees, to concrete architectures -- physically tested
robot swarms, UAV-swarm consensus and authentication schemes, blockchain-based information markets, and
blockchain-secured federated learning -- that now target real multi-robot deployment. Particular attention is given to the
handful of studies that report precise, verifiable numbers: a blockchain-based consensus scheme that remains largely accurate
with over a third of a swarm behaving adversarially, where classical consensus protocols fail outright, and UAV-swarm
consensus and authentication schemes that keep the added security overhead compatible with real-time flight control. Read
together, the evidence supports blockchain-enabled trust management as a coherent and increasingly well-evidenced
architectural pattern for adversarial-robust multi-robot coordination, while leaving deployment at industrial fleet scale,
resource cost on the smallest robotic hardware, and the security of the physical sensing layer beneath the ledger as an open
research agenda.