Hybrid Distributed Ledger Architecture for Secure and Auditable Autonomous Guided Vehicle Operations in Industrial Environments

Abstract

Autonomous Guided Vehicles (AGVs) and mobile robots are increasingly deployed in industrial and critical environments, where ensuring secure, auditable, and reliable operation is paramount. This paper proposes a hybrid architecture that integrates a ROS/ROS2 based robotic control layer with an industrial context platform and a distributed ledger technology (DLT) layer for immutable event recording. The architecture leverages a bridging layer to translate robot state and events into context entities, which are subsequently registered in Hedera Hashgraph or IOTA Shimmer. Laboratory experiments using a Raspberry Pi as an AGV emulator quantify end-to-end latency, throughput, and energy consumption for both DLTs, demonstrating lower latency and more stable performance for Hedera Hashgraph, while IOTA exhibits minimal device-side energy consumption. Additionally, the proposed DLT-based approach is systematically compared with a conventional off-chain implementation based on FIWARE and MongoDB to evaluate trade-offs in latency, throughput, energy efficiency, and auditability between distributed ledger anchoring and traditional database storage. The hybrid on-chain/off-chain design efficiently balances high-volume telemetry storage with secure, traceable event anchoring. Results provide guidance for industrial adoption of ledger-based AGV systems and highlight key trade-offs in latency, energy consumption, scalability, and architectural design choices, offering a foundation for future work on large-scale deployments, privacy preservation, and adaptive anchoring policies.