$ robonomics io
robonomics-io 0.18.0
Run I/O actions using Robonomics Framework.
USAGE:
robonomics io [FLAGS] [OPTIONS] SUBCOMMAND
SUBCOMMANDS:
help Prints this message or the help of the given subcommand(s)
read Read information from device
write Write information into device
At the frontier of cybernetics and economics
Build your IoT services on Robonomics platform *
* taking full advantage of decentralized architecture
Robonomics allows users to connect to smart devices using decentralized applications (dapp)
that do not require the user data transfer for authentication. Communication takes place via a decentralized
network of providers without a single point of failure, and the device independently obtains information
from the blockchain network to run for execution or transmit data remotely. Thus, Robonomics provides a high
level of device cybersecurity and user data privacy at all stages of communication from the user application
to the launch of the smart device.
From smart contracts to cross chain IoT platform
The Robonomics project is over 6 years old. We started to prepare for the first experiment demonstrating
human-machine communication using an independent decentralized provider network in 2015, from the early
days of the Ethereum network. By early 2021, the project team managed to create a techno-economic machine
communication protocol running on top of Ethereum and IPFS, and complement it with elements of a
cloud-based IoT platform based on the Polkadot parachain.
As a result, today, we already have a hybrid platform for creating futuristic IoT applications that
enable interaction with devices under the control of a global decentralized computer.
At the frontier of cybernetics and economics
The creators of Robonomics are experimenters, engineers, and scientists who care to
understand the scientific validity of the approach and achieve clarity in presenting the principles that
should form the basis of the entire architecture of the software solution.
In our articles between 2017 and 2020, we presented the scientific community with many
concepts and solutions united around the idea of the robot economy, an economic system in which robotic
devices act as independent agents capable of performing key economic activities, previously reserved for
humans. You can read the scientific articles at this link.
We would like to justify the emergence of the robot economy and explain in general terms
why we believe that this concept is the inevitable and obvious answer to the functioning of the
large-scale robotic systems of the new industrial revolution.
The Nobel laureate in economics Ronald Coase in his 1937 work “The Nature of the Firm” best demonstrated
the dichotomy «hierarchy vs free market» and gave an explanation of the reasons for the existence of
organizations, in particular firms. Coase discusses the impact of transaction costs (the cost of collecting
and processing information) to make decisions about the conclusion of a contract and to monitor its
implementation. The firm, with all its hierarchical extra-market structure, is formed as the most efficient
way to provide the consumer with the target product with the lowest transaction costs at the moment, when
the transactional effort to create the same product through multiple exchanges on the market between
individuals becomes much higher. To best visualize this process, look at the illustrative example of buying
a car. Try to buy a car by the parts and calculate how much money and time you will spend just to assemble
all the components in your garage. The risks and negotiation costs of buying parts are too high compared to
Tesla’s off-the-shelf Model X.
Nevertheless, this does not lead to the emergence of the world’s only firm for the production of
everything. The point is that the same transaction costs also impose restrictions on the size of firms.
Coase writes:
“...a firm will tend to expand until the costs of organising an extra
transaction within the firm become equal to the costs of carrying out the same transaction by means of an
exchange on the open market...”
In other words, the more complex the hierarchy within the firm, the greater the internal costs, and at some
point, they turn out to be excessive compared to the costs of returning to the market. Therefore, to ensure
their growth as one of the drivers, entrepreneurs are looking for ways to reduce these costs.
The idea of reducing transaction costs through the ability of all participants in the business process
(production, logistics, consumption) to unite at a closer level
clearly correlates with the
problems and
challenges faced by manufacturers of automation solutions. Over the past 50 years, the standard/regular
operations of most business processes of large companies have been almost completely automated. The
manufacturers are essentially left with the task of building secure communication between fully automated
parts of the supply chain, and this task is a factor holding back further reduction of transaction costs
through automation. The desire to market more competitive products or services compared to partially automated
firms spurs the search for solutions to
these challenges. It seems that everything is heading towards the
emergence of robofirms — organizations in which the entire business process cycle is fully automated and does
not require human participation, except as beneficiaries and consumers.
Get rid of transaction costs
Our future in Smart Cities
The task that automation manufacturers are facing today has a specific name — the construction of
cyber-physical systems (abbreviated as CPS). By
definition, a CPS is a strong
unification and mutual integration of multiple computational, networking, and physical processes.
The tasks of building CPS are central to any idea described in the new (fourth) industrial revolution.
Therefore, CPS is the cornerstone of our future life in Smart Cities, manifesting itself everywhere.
Examples of cyber-physical systems of the future are: Uber autopilot, drone selfies, network of 3D printers
in metro stations.
CPS is a complex structure of many connected elements: from the app on the phone, it extends to controlling
the drone in flight over the city, and then proceeds to publishing the resulting photos to Instagram, but
only after processing by cloud AI.
The most important thing in the CPS design process is to find the fine line between sufficient and
excessive number of automated elements in the service user supply chain. In other words, where is the size
limit of the CPS? To answer this question, we should turn to the famous mathematician Norbert Wiener.
Self-regulating systems
Inspired by Norbert Wiener
In 1948 a professor of mathematics at the MIT Norbert Wiener published one of the most seminal works
"Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine". He used the term "cybernetics" as
self-regulating mechanisms for the first time and, so, this publication is considered a recognized
Cybernetic birthday.
Norbert Wiener speaks about viability of interdisciplinary science approach. For example he drew the
parallels between automated control systems and challenges of scaling and complexity increasing of human
society.
So, in other words, the cybernetic approach can be applied equally to psychotherapy, biology and automated
navigation.
It is based on the function of the system, how the individual actions are controlled and how the individual
nodes interact with each other.
Taking into account Ronald Coase's and Norbert Wiener's publications, following up the development of
Industry 4.0, we can consider using CPS as an economic agent, while designing robotized services. To
regulate the size of the CPS and adapt to the changing needs of the individuals we can use market
mechanism.
And what’s so scientifically interesting, taking as a basis the idea of the restrictions imposed by the
market on the size of the firm, we can say that the limit of the increase in CPS will always be determined
by the market and nothing else is required for this.
Robofirms are an ideal representation for cyber-physical systems.
They are a fairly autonomous unit capable of providing services to both humans and other robots for money.
As a result, the robot economy appears to us to be a general set of CPSs that provide services and goods
directly to the market.
Bitcoin
& money for robots
Industry 1.0
Mechanization: replacement of muscle power with steam energy.1784 г.
Industry 2.0
Electrification: introduction of assembly-line production.1870 г.
Industry 3.0
Automation: introduction of automated systems with CNC.1969 г.
Industry 4.0
Smart production: development of cyber physical systems.Now
In the world of robofirms it turns out to be natural to provide robots with access to social institutions
that previously were only needed by humans.
Social institutions do not appear because we are people and physiologically a person cannot live without
banks, contracts, and other instruments of society. But only because a person, at some point in time,
entered the path of more complex relations in society and took an important step towards accelerating the
processes of those around us.
Money and contracts should become available to robots, not because this is a sick fantasy of robot fans
who have forgotten what Skynet is. But only because the new industrial revolution sets itself the task of
building complex automated chains, the processes in which will affect the exchange of both technical
information and economic information, and will also proceed at a speed inaccessible to humans.
One of the examples of our experiments: negotiating road space and right of way payments for autonomous
vehicles to reduce congestion. What a person would absolutely not do in traffic, the car will do for you
without difficulties: you want to switch lanes, your car and your neighbor's car exchange offers on the cost
of such an operation at a rate of hundreds msgs per second, they will reveal an equilibrium price, and so
you are already in the next faster moving lane. This means that now it will become available to “charge”
your ride with uber and make it faster.
Robots need money that will be directly available to them in order to be able to perform operations without
a person at the speed with which only machines can make decisions. And all this is solely for a person to
enjoy life in the Smart City!
And here we smoothly come to the first electronic cash - Bitcoin. The fact that Bitcoin can be stored in
your account on the principle of not a bank, but cash in your wallet makes it the first money that the robot
can manage independently, more precisely autonomously. At the same time, today we can already say that
Bitcoin is not just electronic cash, but a truly global financial institution.
As a result: an event not invented by us, but clearly falling into our
vision, makes Bitcoin the first money for robots, or, if we look even deeper, it is precisely that social
institution that will help the formation of robotic firms.
Smart contracts
Ethereum
Bitcoin became the first money available to robots. Meanwhile we can't talk about Bitcoin
in its current form as a tool for full-fledged technical and economic exchange.
Now we already have smart contracts, DeFi markets and a decentralized infrastructure for exchanging messages
between robots that
open up the possibility for humanity to create a fully automated part of the human economy - the robot
economy.
One of the great opportunity to build the economy of robots is
Ethereum
technology. With Ethereum functionality
robots are able not only exchange money, but to enter into contracts with humans and among themselves.
But what's the point of machine to machine (m2m) contract based communication? That's a great question!
Let's go back to CPS. When we talk about direct communications between sensors, machine equipment or any
other elements
we still talk about collaboration within one regulated system.
But if we want smart cities services to be alive (or even smart home in some cases), we need establish
communication with various third-party elements.
Let's imagine drone delivery service. If a drone, for example, is DHL's property how it can access to
Amazon's warehouses or access to over the entire airspace of the city? Is it be a monopoly? This is a major
challenge for many 4th industrial revolution initiatives!
Most corporations say they need nearly complete rights to its surroundings because they don’t know how to
securely set up the exchange of technical information between automated systems outside of their own
internal corporate structure.
At the same time, if you look at the processes where a person works, then we see that the cooperation of
different corporations has been long and successfully existed.
You can easily order door-to-door delivery of purchased goods on the Amazon website, and the courier will be
able to drive a car along city roads, receive an order at the warehouse and bring it to you.
What's the difference? In the first case there is no way to build a contractual relationship between
machines, and in the second case, in the world of people, contractual relations already exist.
Parachains
Polkadot
The main difficulty that Robonomics faces today is the high price for launching an IoT device using
Ethereum.
In Ethereum you have to pay a commission on each transaction in terms of US dollars in the range of $10 to
$100.
It is quite expensive for most cases from the real economy, be it a car-sharing trip, renting a smart
apartment, drone delivery or 3D printing of your favorite anime hero to order.
Out of fairness, we would like to note that there are profitable scenarios even with transaction fees in the
Ethereum network of 2018 - 2019. For example, automated carbon footprint offset transactions or transferring
the order from the website directly to the production.
But still, for the mass application of the web3 technologies in the field of IoT, a reduction in the price
that the cloud charges from the connected device is required.
Looking for an opportunity to reduce the cost of interacting with an IoT device, Robonomics developers have
studied alternative developments to Ethereum.
Our choice settled on the
Polkadot
architecture, which would allow us to run our own blockchain, within a common network, in which security is
ensured by validators independent of our project.
Polkadot
Ethereum 2.0
Heterogeneous Blockchain Network
Homogeneous Shard Network
On-chain protocol control
Protection against the tyranny of the crowd
Auction of bandwidth in the common network
Payment for gas by users
open questions of teleology
Inspired by Norbert Wiener
One extremely popular question that still remains open — the purposefulness of
robots when providing services to people. This is a specific but academically important question. The fact
is that human economics often includes factors related to the good faith performance of tasks in a contract,
the desire of the parties to achieve a result, and the opportunistic and altruistic behavior of the
individual in society. It is difficult to talk about such issues in robotics today, so the developers of
Robonomics would like to leave teleological issues open for further study, and focus their attention on the
praxeological part of robots’ behavior as economic agents. Regarding goal setting, an early article by
Norbert Wiener and his colleagues “Behavior, Purpose and Teleology”, as well as the work of the American
economist and philosopher Ludwig von Mises on human activity can be considered as points of reference.
Mises, in his book «Human Action: A Treatise of Economics», looks at the human being in economics from a
praxeological perspective. Praxeology gives us an interesting insight into human behavior without a direct
correlation to the ultimate goal. By continuing to study the phenomena in human economics from the
perspective of the processes themselves, separated from the end goals, we can understand more about the
framework that can be formed for a robot economy, so as not to delve into questions of machine teleology.
Have you read this?
Great books lead to great ideas. If you're after more inspiration about
human-machine communication, try reading science fiction books. Mark the books you’ve already read and see
what else can we offer you for further reflection.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Philip K. Dick
Autofac
Philip K. Dick
I, Robot
Isaac Asimov
The Bicentennial Man
Isaac Asimov
Neuromancer
William Gibson
Marionettes, Inc.
Ray Bradbury
Open questions of teleology
and a treatise by L. von Mises
In conclusion, we would like to mention questions that remain open from a global point of view.
What is the goal of robots?
In fact, the economy of people is often associated with the conscientiousness of performing tasks within
the framework of the contract, the desire of the parties to achieve a result, the opportunistic and
altruistic behavior of the individual in society.
All of these principles are hard to apply to the robot economy.
What are the motives of the robot economy? It's an open question that we need to research and discuss in
society for better understanding and applying robots.
For the start we suggest to look at Mises's work "Human Action: A Treatise on Economics" (praxeological
approach) and at early article by Norbert Wiener "Behavior, Purpose and Teleology" (teleological
vision).
Praxeology inspires us with interesting ideas about human behavior without direct dependence on the
purposes.
This gives us the opportunity to work on the processes of the economy of robots conditionally as with a
black
box without delving into the ultimate goals. At the same time, teleology poses a challenge to explain
causes.
We hope that somewhere at the junction of the works of Mises and Wiener, a point for further development of
the
robot economy may be found, not just as a protocol of interaction between people and machines of a
praxeological nature, but taking into account the teleological elements of building interspecies
communication.