PhDSupervision:VolkerStrobel

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General Information

Personal

Name: Volker Strobel

Birthdate: 10 November 1987

Belgian mobile phone: +32 483 42 21 04

Belgian home adress: Avenue Wielemans Ceuppens 138, 1190 Forest / Bruxelles

ULB-related

PhD started: 7 September 2016

Matricule ULB: 000443899

Office phone: +32-2-650 27 12

Projects

Work Schedule

Lab Responsibilities

  • IRIDIA server maintenance

Tutorials

Literature

See separate page

FRIA

Meetings

Meeting 27/9/2016

  • Continue literature research (read papers mentioned in FRIA proposal)
  • Find out which labs are doing blockchain / cryptocurrency / cryptography research (see Google Docs)

Meeting 4/10/2016

Meeting 18/10/2016

Intermediate Meeting

  • French language course Mon 31 October - Fri 4 November time: 9am - 1pm

Meeting 15/11/2016

  • Continued literature research
  • Started first web application for smart contracts (http://164.15.10.140/) with very basic functionality:
    • Robots can be added to the swarm
    • Miner can issue a premium in Ether as incentive for removing oil
    • Oil can be removed by pressing a button -> sender gets rewarded
  • Experimented a bit with ARGoS
  • Discussed points during the meeting:
    • I need a convincing problem/application that absolutely requires the blockchain (could be very different from the oil spill removal task)
    • Look into PoW/PoS/PoX algorithms and see which one is best for robot swarms (also look into "Physical Proof of Work"); since robots are computationally rather limited, we need a clever consensus algorithm, otherwise, an attacker could easily perform a 51% attack; also find out which cryptocurrencies use which algorithm; see if it is possible to switch to PoS in Ethereum
    • Investigate possibilities for light clients (e.g., each city/organization could have a node that maintains the blockchain and the corresponding robots just run light clients)
    • I can use the footbot simulation for now but will probably use the e-puck in the real experiments

Meeting 22/11/2016

  • Created simple interface between ARGoS and Ethereum
  • Possible application scenario:
    • Robots work remotely, without real-time supervision (e.g., deep sea, planetary exploration, or underground)
    • Robots should be fully autonomous (that is no single point of failure, no one can just press a button and stop them)
    • The swarm can add new members at any time (there is no need of authentification, any robot can join)
    • The swarm members are untrusted, however, but the blockchain can be trusted
    • Physical Proof of Work
    • Robots possibly belong to different organizations (e.g. collaboration between different countries)