  Visual homing is a lightweight approach to robot visual navigation. Based
upon stored visual information of a home location, the navigation back to this
location can be accomplished from any other location in which this location is
visible by comparing home to the current image. However, a key challenge of
visual homing is that the target home location must be within the robot's field
of view (FOV) to start homing. Therefore, this work addresses such a challenge
by integrating blockchain technology into the visual homing navigation system.
Based on the decentralized feature of blockchain, the proposed solution enables
visual homing robots to share their visual homing information and synchronously
access the stored data (visual homing information) in the decentralized ledger
to establish the navigation path. The navigation path represents a per-robot
sequence of views stored in the ledger. If the home location is not in the FOV,
the proposed solution permits a robot to find another robot that can see the
home location and travel towards that desired location. The evaluation results
demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed framework in terms of end-to-end
latency, throughput, and scalability.
