Self-governed access control in open robot swarms using a blockchain-based DAO

What happened

arXiv:2611.03975v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robot swarms harness simple, local interactions among many individually limited robots to produce complex, coordinated collective behavior, making them valuable across domains from agriculture to disaster response. Blockchain technology has recently been incorporated into robot swarms, offering secure, decentralized coordination and improved resilience, though largely in closed settings with a fixed, predetermined membership.

The ability to dynamically adjust swarm size has been shown to be beneficial, for instance by reducing inconsistencies and network partitioning, especially under sparse connectivity or in complex environments, ultimately improving task performance. For practical deployment, however, open swarms requires governance, particularly protection against Byzantine behavior (i.e., faulty or malicious robots), since allowing robots to join freely also makes the swarm easier to infiltrate.