Improving Multi-Robot Visual Navigation Using Cooperative Consensus

WAVN (Wide Area Visual Navigation) is an approach to robot team navigation that uses the current visual information from all team members to allow any team member to cooperatively navigate to a distant (out of view) destination. Neither map nor robot position information is needed. Current applications include agriculture and forestry, particularly in remote locations. However, increasingly ubiquitous camera sensors indicate that WAVN could be used as a lightweight navigation paradigm for robot teams in households, offices, public areas, and manufacturing applications. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a novel synergy of navigation and blockchain methodologies: A novel robot-centric blockchain consensus mechanism based on common visual landmarks between pairs of robots. We show how this mechanism guarantees specific navigability properties for the ledger, resulting in an improved WAVN navigation algorithm, Randomly Shortened Chain (RSC), and we present navigation performance results to demonstrate the improved efficiency due to cooperation.