General Motors Patent

General Motors or GM (an American multinational corporation specializing in designing, manufacturing, marketing, and distributing vehicles and vehicle parts, along with selling financial services) has quite recently filed a Patent Application for a navigation map system capable of updating continuously. The system would efficiently make use of blockchain for integrating data from vehicle sensors and further building a reliable map for autonomous vehicles.

As per the Patent Filing, which was submitted on 1st October 2018 and got published on 2nd April 2020, the already existing navigation map systems face difficulty in staying dynamic without incurring massive costs. One potential reason behind the same is that most of the navigation map systems are maintained via specialized vehicles with a reach necessarily be limited to only a few particular sections of the world.

The patent, that is, General Motors’ solution, focuses on distributing the process to multiple vehicles, which would, in turn, gather data about their surroundings via sensors conveniently while driving around. The real-time data collected would then be compared with a discrepancy detector, which evaluates the already existing maps. The difference, if any, would then be transmitted to a blockchain network, which holds all the map data. The candidate transaction is validated only in scenarios where the other vehicles report a similar change as well. The patent filing further suggests that the blockchain network would be maintained proactively by both the vehicles and the mining nodes located in the data centers.

The system is most probably developed for General Motors’ Super Cruise feature, which offers a semi-automated driving experience on some luxury models or vehicles. Unlike other competitors in the market such as Tesla, the system depends heavily on navigation maps, as a result of which, it can only be used on supported roads.

The distribution of the map generation process would probably result in speeding up the manufacturer’s efforts to cover most of the roads in the United States. The patent application has revealed that one of the crucial advantages of the system lies in distributing the map generation process and further enabling various vendors to contribute to a single map, which most probably is the reason behind the system implementing blockchain.

When it comes to the blockchain sector, General Motors is indeed one of the most prolific car manufacturers. Last year in October, the company was in the list of five car manufacturers testing an identification and blockchain-based payment system for cars. In June 2019, the company’s finance arm invested in a blockchain startup to curb auto financing fraud. The manufacturer in December 2018 patented another blockchain-based communication system, which would help entities significantly in communicating with autonomous cars.