RoboComm: A DID-based scalable and privacy-preserving Robot-to-Robot interaction over state channels

In a multi robot system establishing trust amongst untrusted robots from different organisations while preserving a robot's privacy is a challenge. Recently decentralized technologies such as smart contract and blockchain are being explored for applications in robotics. However, the limited transaction processing and high maintenance cost hinder the widespread adoption of such approaches. Moreover, blockchain transactions be they on public or private permissioned blockchain are publically readable which further fails to preserve the confidentiality of the robot's data and privacy of the robot. In this work, we propose RoboComm a Decentralized Identity based approach for privacy-preserving interaction between robots. With DID a component of Self-Sovereign Identity; robots can authenticate each other independently without relying on any third-party service. Verifiable Credentials enable private data associated with a robot to be stored within the robot's hardware, unlike existing blockchain based approaches where the data has to be on the blockchain. We improve throughput by allowing message exchange over state channels. Being a blockchain backed solution RoboComm provides a trustworthy system without relying on a single party. Moreover, we implement our proposed approach to demonstrate the feasibility of our solution.