BlockRobot: Increasing Privacy in Human Robot Interaction by Using Blockchain

Social robots can cause privacy concerns for humans, both because they collect personal data while moving around globally, and because humans can perceive them as social actors. Nowadays, robots can record and transmit (private) data in a human-readable format, which is identified as a problem in human-robot interaction (HRI). Privacy is an individual’s right to have control over its data. With this problem in mind, we present BlockRobot – a new privacy-by-design conceptual model for access control of personal data based on Blockchain (BC) technology. With this solution, we ensure data privacy rights by giving each user control over its data in a decentralized manner without the need for an intermediate data controller. This BC solution grants confidentiality, integrity, and non-repudiation of data transparently and fairly to every user. As proof of concept, we demonstrate the initial implementation of a Decentralized Application (DAP) based on EOS Blockchain integrated with robotic events that contain private data. This paper details the experiments conducted with a Social Robot (SR) in a non-lab environment, and the collected data is analyzed using process mining techniques.