Blockchain-Empowered Multi-Robot Collaboration to Fight COVID-19 and Future Pandemics

S. H. Alsamhi, Brian Lee

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    77 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    This conceptual paper overviews how blockchain technology is involving the operation of multi-robot collaboration for combating COVID-19 and future pandemics. Robots are a promising technology for providing many tasks such as spraying, disinfection, cleaning, treating, detecting high body temperature/mask absence, and delivering goods and medical supplies experiencing an epidemic COVID-19. For combating COVID-19, many heterogeneous and homogenous robots are required to perform different tasks for supporting different purposes in the quarantine area. Managmnt and decentralizing multi-robot play a vital role in combating COVID-19 by reducing human interaction, monitoring, delivering goods. Blockchain technology can manage multi-robot collaboration in a decentralized fashion, improve the interaction among them to exchange information, share representation, share goals, and trust. We highlight the challenges and provide the tactical solutions enabled by integrating blockchain and multi-robot collaboration to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. The proposed conceptual framework can increase the intelligence, decentralization, and autonomous operations of connected multi-robot collaboration in the blockchain network. We overview blockchain potential benefits to defining a framework of multi-robot collaboration applications to combat COVID-19 epidemics such as monitoring and outdoor and hospital End to End (E2E) delivery systems. Furthermore, we discuss the challenges and opportunities of integrated blockchain, multi-robot collaboration, and the Internet of Things (IoT) for combating COVID-19 and future pandemics.

    Original languageEnglish
    Article number9240034
    Pages (from-to)44173-44197
    Number of pages25
    JournalIEEE Access
    Volume9
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2021

    Keywords

    • Blockchain
    • COVID-19
    • E2E delivery system
    • decentralization
    • infectious diseases
    • multi-robot collaboration
    • pandemic
    • quarantine
    • smart healthcare

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