Abstract
With the growing popularity of robots, the development of robot applications is subject to an ever increasing number of additional requirements from e.g., safety, legal and ethical sides. The certification of an application for compliance to such requirements is an essential step in the development of a robot program. However, at this point in time it must be ensured that the integrity of this program is preserved meaning that no intentional or unintentional modifications happen to the program until the robot executes it. Based on the abstraction of robot programs as workflows we present in this work a cryptography-powered distributed infrastructure for the preservation of robot workflows. A client composes a robot program and once it is accepted a separate entity provides a digital signature for the workflow and its parameters which can be verified by the robot before executing it. We demonstrate a real-world implementation of this infrastructure using a mobile manipulator and its software stack. We also provide an outlook on the integration of this work into our larger undertaking to provide a distributed ledger-based compliant robot application development environment.
Highlights
Robots have found more and broader fields of applications in recent years
Before we focus on our architecture, we clarify the meaning of compliant and accountable robotic application development in the context of our concept
For the first we captured the network traffic caused by the single components in order to get the data overhead produced by the compliance infrastructure
Summary
Robots have found more and broader fields of applications in recent years. As this trend is expected to increase in the coming years, more and more requirements for the widespread use of robots have emerged as well. No matter where a robot is used or how it was programmed, it is important that it executes the program that its developer has implemented This is a key issue, especially since robots have strong safety implications in most of their fields of applications. In general, we expect our technical systems to behave the way they were intended to and not be intentionally or unintentionally modified by unauthorized entities [1] This expectation raises the requirement of program integrity which must be ensured from the finalization of a robot program until the end of its execution on the machine itself. While there are established mechanisms to perform verification and validation of applications, there are currently hardly any mechanisms to protect an accepted application before its execution This integrity is key to make sure that the robot behaves in a way compliant to the specified requirements. The most relevant security standard in this area, IEC62443 defines in its part 4-2 the component requirement CR 3.4 that requires a component to provide methods to ensure software and information integrity [2]
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