Beyond Cryptocurrencies: Exploring Blockchain Consensus for Swarm Robotics Applications; A Review

In the current information superhighway epoch, consensus algorithms are playing a very important role in dynamic and rapidly evolving network technologies like blockchain, IoT systems and swarm robotics network applications. Ensuring the integrity, security, and efficiency of any decentralized network is becoming an uphill task because of failures, malicious actions and intrusion challenges in the network. On the other hand, the consensus mechanism helps in achieving a common agreement about transactions among trust-less network participants and maintaining the network’s integrity by ensuring a consistent and reliable state of the system across all nodes despite potential failures, delays, or presence of malicious actors in any decentralized networks. This review paper conducts a comprehensive analysis on most commonly used consensus algorithms by studying their capabilities, working principles, strengths, and limitations with the aim of providing insights into their existing challenges and gaps in using these algorithms for integrating blockchain platform with swarm systems. This study will lead to designing a suitable blockchain-based secured consensus algorithm for swarm robotics network applications.