Qrkey: Simply and Securely Controlling Swarm Robots
Alexandre Abadie, Malisa Vucinic, Diego Badillo, Said Alvarado-Marin, Filip Maksimovic, Thomas Watteyne (2024, February)
In IEEE International Workshop on Networked Robotics and Communication Systems (NetRobiCS), Vancouver, Canada, 20 May, 2024.
Abstract:
Swarm robotics is a research field on robotic collaboration where large number of robots are deployed to complete collective real-world tasks. Progress made in the field now tends to be democratized through swarm deployments such that users with different background can learn, program, conduct research or just play with them. One of the main challenges for swarm operators, though, is to keep the infrastructure at reasonable complexity, maintenance level, and price, to allow occasional users to interact with many robots smoothly. In this paper, we present Qrkey, an open-source library which provides an engaging, accessible and trustworthy user experience to control and track robots in a swarm. After a detailed presentation of the primitives and the protocol proposed by Qrkey, we discuss the security concerns raised by this solution. Finally, we conclude by giving Qrkey limitations and possible future work.