PhDSupervision:VolkerStrobel

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

Work Schedule

Lab Responsibilities

• IRIDIA server maintenance

Tutorials

• Udemy: Ethereum Developer: Build A Decentralised Blockchain App Completed 75 %
• Coursera: Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies

FRIA

• Presentation
• Ideas for next proposal: Ideas

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

• Propose literature (see separate page)
• Séance d'information sur les financements permettant des mobilités dans le cadre d’un doctorat [1][2][3]
• Practice presentation with Marco, Yasu, Gaetan, and Ken (Volker - Comments of Marco, Yasu, Gaetan, and Ken)

Meeting 18/10/2016

• French language course Mon 31 October - Fri 4 November?
• iMAL Blockchain symposium & showcase Friday 4 November 2pm - 6pm (0 EUR) -- http://imal.org/en/activity/blockchain-fact-fiction-future/
• iMAL Hacklab Saturday 5 November (30 EUR)

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

• Application Scenario
• Proof-of-X
• Created simple interface between ARGoS and Ethereum node
• TODO: Find out, which application scenario is suited for blockchain technology (for example by reading Swarm robotics: a review); see if Amanda's paper is relevant

Intermediate Meeting 25/11/2016

• Discussed Collective decisions

Meeting 29/11/2016

• Finished Week 1 of Coursera course
• Started ARGoS simulation for the collective decisions scenario (centralized version):
  • 10 robots, each robot has an account/address with some ETH
  • Robots with id 0 - 3: send opinion red; Robots with id 4 - 9: send opinion green
  • If a robot detects a wall or another robot it sends its opinion via the smart contract
  • After a random amount of time an epoch is finished, the majority opinion is determined, and the counters for red and green are set back to 0
  • TODO:
    • Make voting only possible if 1 ETH is send with the transaction
    • Distribute ETH after an epoch is finished
    • Base opinions on sensor inputs
    • Implement strategies for changing opinions (e.g., majority opinion, voter model)

Meeting 7/12/2016

• Implemented decentralized ARGoS/Ethereum framework
  • Each robot is an Ethereum node
  • Some are miners (currently, only one is a miner)
  • Only robots that are physically close to each other are connected to each other via their Ethereum nodes
• TODO:
  • Transfer simple scenario to collective decision scenario
  • Transfer framework to the cluster (and see if it is possible at all, since the processes have to talk to each other; maybe reserve some fixed cluster nodes)
• Looked at Davide's code and Master's thesis
• Answer Pedro (Innoviris funding)

Meeting 13/12/2016

• Prototype of collective decision scenario with Epucks in ARGoS
• Next steps:
  • Transfer to cluster (first steps are done)
  • Improve voting strategies (e.g., payed voting, direct modulation, ...)

Meeting 19/12/2016

• Transferred framework to cluster
• Conducted some experiments
• Robots are always mining now
• MAJORITY VOTING: black is: 664 white is: 1032 -> Choosing white