Achieving More Responsible Drone-Use by Means of Blockchain Technology

Abstract

With the advent of a smart society and an era of connectivity, there remain a numerous amount of challenges yet to be solved. One of the key IoT innovations analysed in this research is known as Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS). UAS, or drone technologies, allow carrying out repetitive and dangerous tasks with almost no human intervention or supervision (Fernández-Caramés, Blanco-Novoa, Froiz-Míguez & Fraga-Lamas, 2019). The advent of drone utilisation in both public and civil domains has led to application areas such as realtimemonitoring and surveillance, parcel delivery, search and rescue missions (e.g. ER), remote sensing in agriculture and multiple other application domains (Valavanis & Vachtsevanos, 2015). However, the fast pacing development of interconnected devices and systems has outrun the human understanding and experience of usage, imposing challenges with regards to technical security, trust and of course privacy (Coetzee & Eksteen, 2011). Subsequently, most drones are limited to computing, storing and sharing data, making them vulnerable to adversarialattacks. A need for a more responsible adoption of drone-use exists and must be fulfilled with care. To this, a blockchain-based solution is proposed.The focus of this research is on a Dutch independent agency part of the Ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality, called the Netherlands Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority (NVWA). They have been actively using drones since 2017 and their main tasks consist of supervision, risk assessment and risk communication with the goal to protect the human and animal welfare (NVWA,n.d.). An explorative research approach was taken whereby the current bottlenecks experienced by the NVWA were identified and visualised, by means of desk research and semi-structured interviews. Subsequently, the sociotechnical effects of the use of drone detecting services by the NVWA were identified to obtain the key values for a responsible redesign. In this way, the role of the values, an understanding of the roles of institutions realizing these values, and the stakeholder engagement is understood. After identifying the open issues and conflicting values, a redesign phase began with the trade off between three mitigating security techniques.Blockchain technology is found to be the most suitable security technique in this research and fills in the ’lack of transparency’ gap which is crucial for a responsible redesign. Although it hasn’t reached full maturity and could induce undesired delays, it increases the security level of the organisation significantlyand takes into account the key values security and privacy. Moreover, the data managing method allows users to validate, maintain and synchronize the content of a transaction ledger which is replicated across the other users in the network (Tapscott & Tapscott, 2017).The solution has proven to work in existing literature and automotive contexts and is therefore generalisable in multiple on-going projects of the NVWA. Subsequently, the novel data managing method could be used as for revenue models such as digitised inspections. This indicates future growth options andpotential competitive advantages. All in all, the benefits outweigh the uncertainties of this technologyand it is believed that a blockchain based solution will be the next big step to achieve more responsible implementation of drones.