Designing Trustful Cooperation Ecosystems is Key to the New Space Exploration Era
<|reference_start|>Designing Trustful Cooperation Ecosystems is Key to the New Space Exploration Era: In the emerging space economy, autonomous robotic missions with specialized goals such as mapping and mining are gaining traction, with agencies and enterprises increasingly investing resources. Multirobot systems (MRS) research has provided many approaches to establish control and communication layers to facilitate collaboration from a technical perspective, such as granting more autonomy to heterogeneous robotic groups through auction-based interactions in mesh networks. However, stakeholders' competing economic interests often prevent them from cooperating within a proprietary ecosystem. Related work suggests that distributed ledger technology (DLT) might serve as a mechanism for enterprises to coordinate workflows and trade services to explore space resources through a transparent, reliable, non-proprietary digital platform. We challenge this perspective by pointing to the core technical weaknesses of blockchains, in particular, increased energy consumption, low throughput, and full transparency through redundancy. Our objective is to advance the discussion in a direction where the benefits of DLT from an economic perspective are weighted against the drawbacks from a technical perspective. We finally present a possible DLT-driven heterogeneous MRS for map exploration to study the opportunities for economic collaboration and competitiveness.<|reference_end|>
@article{baima2024designing,
    title={Designing Trustful Cooperation Ecosystems is Key to the New Space
  Exploration Era},
    author={Renan Lima Baima (1), Lo"ick Chovet (2), Johannes Sedlmeir (1),
  Gilbert Fridgen (1) and Miguel Angel Olivares-Mendez (2) ((1) FINATRAX -
  Digital Financial Services and Cross-Organisational Digital Transformations,
  (2) SpaceR - Space Robotics, SnT - Interdisciplinary Centre for Security,
  Reliability and Trust, University of Luxembourg)},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.06036},
    year={2024},
    doi={10.1145/3639476.3639760},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2402.06036},
    primaryClass={cs.RO cs.CY cs.MA cs.NI cs.SY eess.SY}
}