ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on integrating blockchain with the emerging Tactile Internet as one of the most interesting 6G applications and the next leap in the evolution of today's Internet of Things (IoT). After explaining the commonalities and specific differences between Ethereum and Bitcoin blockchains, we first provided an up-to-date survey on how Ethereum can be used for realizing the emerging blockchain IoT (B-IoT). Next, we showed that the Tactile Internet integrates human users, artificial intelligence (AI) software agents, and robots into teams. The resultant human-agent-robot team (HART) in turn enables clusters of local co-production and collaboration, which leverage human intelligence to support robots and AI agents. We then elaborated on how specific Ethereum blockchain technologies may be leveraged to realize future techno-social systems, notably the Tactile Internet. We showed that a central role plays the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), which executes smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain and requires the involvement of human participants to perform certain tasks that autonomous AI-based software agents and robots themselves cannot do (e.g., voting, collective decision making, and skills transfer). In the attempt of keeping the DAO as autonomous as possible, we used the teleoperated robot as an autonomous agent (automation at the center), while letting the human operator be a decision-maker supported by a set of nearby skilled human operators (humans at the edge) who transfer knowledge when the human/robot is in need, resulting in a new hybrid form of human-robot collaboration.
