Open Planetary Network of Robots
Example
the Yak Robotics Garage (YaRG) project
Venkatesh Rao:
"The goal of this project is to create a planet-wide network of open-source rovers and other robots (such as drones), as a stepping stone towards rover networks on the moon and Mars. The idea started with Anuraj R. (a Protocol School alum) figuring out how to teleoperate robots securely, in exchange for blockchain payments, and then generalizing the mechanism to use the ERC 8004 protocol (a sort of onchain directory and rating service for AI agents) to drive discovery of available robots for tasking.
Summer of Protocols researcher rafa then joined in the fun and prototyped an auction marketplace to allow for posting of jobs for robots, and bidding by robots able to do them. There is currently a demo marketplace going (with dummy data, and a mix of real and virtual rovers, but real prototype protocol plumbing behind it) and plans underway to test the technology in the construction sector.
Where does AI fit in here?
Well, the problem with operating an open network of rovers in the real world is that there can be a dizzying variety of hardware types with different capabilities, owned by a large variety of actors of different levels of trustworthiness, situated in different environments. There can be all sorts of potential operators anywhere on the planet – or even on an entirely different planet – with varied skill levels.
Rather than brittle and specialized command modes, you want high-intelligence robots of all sorts to expose their capabilities to potential users/customers via a flexible command surface, and high-intelligence clients commanding them using LLMs that can understand their varied technical capabilities and map them to the needs of particular tasks and missions.
So you use MCP (Model Context Protocol) to expose the capabilities, ERC 8004 (try searching for “robot”) to discover the capabilities, LLM agents to use those capabilities to get tasks done, and either traditional or blockchain rails, using the x402 protocol, to organize a marketplace for robotic services to be provisioned and procured for money.
Those are just the main moving parts in a rather complex scheme – but one in which all the complexity is mainly dealt with by AIs rather than humans."
(https://protocolized.summerofprotocols.com/p/a-primordial-computing-soup)