Performance evaluation of hyper-ledger fabric-based consensus mechanism on multi-robot path planning

Path planning is one of the key issues in Robotics. Finding the optimal path in a dense environment is a very critical task. Coordination and collision avoidance between diverse robots is necessary for creating a collision-free environment as well as efficient path planning. Therefore, with any collision avoidance, it is very important to form a consensus among the robots to reach an optimal solution. The consensus is a term that is used in various platforms (Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Hyperledger fabric) in the blockchain, which means that an agreement between entities is the only appropriate solution. There are different platforms in the blockchain (Some of which are public and some are private), where consensus can be formed between robots. Mobile robots are one of the resource-constraint devices, in terms of memory, battery, storage, and limited on-board processing. For this reason, various researches state that the public blockchain (like Proof of Work) is not appropriate for resource-constraints devices such as robotics. Private Blockchain network, such as Hyperledger Fabric may be a better choice for the resource constrained devices. In this paper, Kafka-based ordering service is being implemented in a multi-robot path planning environment. The simulation results say, despite being resource-intensive Kafka is better than Solo in many aspects. Kafka-based ordering service is efficient in terms of consensus time, ledger commit latency, and CPU utilization in a robotics environment.