Proof-of-work for robotics: verifying real-world work with attestation
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Robot work logs are cheap to fake, so verification needs stacked evidence: GPS, inertial data, camera and LiDAR fingerprints, TEE attestation and cross-checking with penalties, making lies expensive.
Classic Proof-of-Work proves that compute happened. Robotics also needs a Proof-of-Work, but different: work happened in the real world.
So the core question becomes: “Did the job actually happen?”
A robot can say it went somewhere. It can even upload logs. But logs are cheap to fake unless you anchor them to something harder to forge: a combination of sensor data, location signals, and tamper-resistant attestation (so the data is “signed” by a trusted execution environment).
This is where hardware-backed attestation (TEEs) becomes relevant: you’re trusting the operator to report honestly, and you’re also shifting the trust toward a measured, verifiable runtime that can prove what code ran and what data it observed, then produce a cryptographic report.
In practice, this won’t be one magic proof. It’ll look like stacked evidence: GPS + inertial sensors + camera/LiDAR fingerprints + attestation + cross-checking (and penalties when reports conflict). The goal is to make lies expensive enough.
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