Blockchain-Based Robot Identity and Coordination in Multi-Agent Environments

Abstract

Blockchain technology, with its decentralized ledger and smart‑contract capabilities, offers a robust framework for addressing critical challenges in multi‑agent robotic systems—namely, trustless identity management, secure peer authentication, and fault‑tolerant task coordination. In traditional architectures, centralized controllers enforce policies and mediate interactions, creating single points of failure, scalability bottlenecks, and opportunities for malicious interference. By contrast, a permissioned blockchain network distributes authority across participating robots, enabling each agent to verify the provenance of messages, enforce consensus‑driven agreements, and record immutable logs of interactions. This study presents a comprehensive examination of blockchain‑based robot identity and coordination in multi‑agent environments. We systematically review existing decentralized identity (DID) schemes and smart‑contract protocols, analyze their performance through statistical comparisons with centralized baselines, and implement a Hyperledger Fabric prototype across ten heterogeneous mobile robots. Our experiments demonstrate that on‑chain identity registration and automated smart‑contract–driven task allocation reduce coordination latency by 35%, improve task completion rates by 9.8%, and shorten fault recovery times by 20%, albeit with a 17% increase in energy consumption due to cryptographic operations.