  The integration of blockchain technology in robotic systems has been met by
the community with a combination of hype and skepticism. The current literature
shows that there is indeed potential for more secure and trustable distributed
robotic systems. However, it is still unclear in what aspects of robotics
beyond high-level decision making can blockchain technology be indeed usable.
This paper explores the limits of a permissioned blockchain framework,
Hyperledger Fabric, for teleoperation. Remote operation of mobile robots can
benefit from the auditability and security properties of a blockchain. We study
the potential benefits and the main limitations of such an approach. We
introduce a new design and implementation for a event-driven Fabric-ROS 2
bridge that is able to maintain lower latencies at higher network loads than
previous solutions. We also show this opens the door to more realistic use
cases and applications. Our experiments with small aerial robots show latencies
in the hundreds of milliseconds and simultaneous control of both a single and
multi-robot system. We analyze the main trade-offs and limitations for
real-world near real-time remote teleoperation.
