Quantum-Resistant Trust Orchestration for Secure Internet of Robotic Things: Decentralized Consensus meets Real-Time Safety Guarantees

This paper presents a practical trust orchestration framework for the Internet of Robotic Things that is resilient to quantum era threats while preserving real time safety for robot teams. We identify the main risks that arise when robotic systems rely on remote trust services and distributed consensus for joint tasks. We design a layered architecture that combines lightweight post quantum cryptographic primitives with a decentralized consensus protocol and a local safety monitor that enforces control invariants at run time. We provide a clear threat model and describe how the components interact to prevent common attacks and to contain faults. We evaluate the approach in mixed simulation and hardware tests that measure communication cost consensus finality and safety outcomes under adversarial conditions. Results show that the framework maintains safety bounds for robot motion even when consensus is delayed and that the selected post quantum primitives add moderate overhead that is compatible with edge class hardware. The paper contributes a full system design a set of engineering guidelines and an open evaluation suite to help researchers and engineers build safer and future proof trust services for robotic systems.