How Blockchain Might Augment the Self-Driving Revolution
The autonomous vehicle industry has slowed its pace of innovation and development over the last few months. Current “state-of-the-art” hardware isn’t efficient enough to support the massive amount of computation that is required to drive your car through an intersection. Overall, these systems are expensive for both the manufacturer and the customer.
Autonomous cars are great, right?
These cars are amazing machines. They can avoid barriers, manage breaking and accelerating, and even find the optimal path to your destination. They take gigabytes of information from their environment every second and process all of it quickly in order to calculate their respective next step. Yet, when you start adding more data to the equation — more cars — things start to break down. Autonomous cars cannot anticipate or calculate the car-in-front’s next step and cannot trust each other, so they must be ready for the worst of cases.
A nice way to go around this problem is to decide upon a common entity that will decide what happens on the road and when. Any car on the road will have to contact this “road-master” and send it the desired location, current location, etc., then the road-master will calculate each and every car’s next step allowing some to go, and instructing some to stop or wait.
But what if a car doesn’t want to wait? What if a car can’t wait? What if a car is in a hurry to the hospital? Who should be the road-master in that case? What if someone has hacked the system? What are the privacy concerns that are introduced with this kind of system?
The short answer: Complete chaos.
The long answer: You could avoid some of the above issues with more road-masters.
The best answer: Use blockchain technology.
Catching a Ride on the Blockchain
Blockchain technology can enable autonomous cars to trust each other and calculate — in a decentralized way — the flow of cars on the road. On a blockchain-based transportation system, cars will have to wait, but waiting times will be distributed in a fair and controlled way. Hackers won’t be able to hack the system as easily because of the security of a blockchain, and there are no privacy concerns because blockchains can be completely anonymous.
Blockchain-driven autonomous cars will remove the uncertainty and strengthen trust that autonomous cars must have with each turn of the wheel, from each individual car, to the road itself. This automated collaboration constitutes a team effort of all the cars on the road to maintain road safety and efficiency simultaneously. If two cars trust each other that they won’t get in each other’s way, they won’t have to feel paranoid on the road.
As more cars join the local network, the computational power and complexity needed to ensure roads’ safety drops. Why? Because all nearby autonomous vehicles can trust the entire network that they will not get in each other’s way, they don’t have to compute for nor take into consideration all the worst-case scenarios that might occur. In a perfect system, one where every car on the road is a part of the network, individual cars will only have to consider collisions with non-vehicular objects — like trees or walls — and even so, the network can collectively calculate these scenarios and share the data among all network members.
Although this system can be very beneficial to self-driving cars, it does not replace any of the sensors, cameras, and software that these cars currently use. A blockchain-driven car can’t avoid a pedestrian or an animal, it can only avoid car-to-car collisions (for now). This system’s goal is only to remove some of the trust issues and paranoia your autonomous car will have to endure as it gets you where you need to go.
The traffic light that traded with the bus — a vision for the future…
There are already a few companies working on this: the MIT Media Lab, affiliated with Dr. Alex Pentland from Orbs partner Endor, partnered with Toyota last year to find ways to speed up autonomous vehicle technology over blockchain. German auto manufacturer Porsche is working with XAIN, a Berlin startup, on a project to find other uses for connected cars (like transferring control to other drivers temporarily, or authorizing unlock access for UPS drivers to drop off packages).
There are a lot of ways to implement these systems and all of them can be ranked in a number of ways. As the system becomes less centered around an individual car’s decision and more on the collective decision-making of these interlinked vehicles, the entire system becomes safer to operate.
On the bottom rung of this ladder is a system where a given group of cars creates a small, tight-knit network that makes sure no collision between them occurs. As the system decentralizes more, the decisions can move into the hands of intersections or traffic lights, thus giving more control to the government. One step ahead is a system in which all transportation — public and private — converges into one grand mechanism.
You will pay to get from point A to point B, but the cars will do everything else.
Gedalyah Reback contributed to this post.
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