Bruce Pon:

BigchainDB is proud to announce that a live prototype for sharing of autonomous vehicle data has been built in collaboration with the Toyota Research Institute (TRI) and the MIT Media Lab. The Autonomous Vehicle Data Exchange – AVDEX – allows researchers to buy datasets from data producers, for improving the artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) algorithms for autonomous vehicles. The prototype was presented at Consensus 2017 in New York.

Autonomous vehicles offer the promise to radically reduce the over one million annual road deaths around the world, because they never text while driving, get distracted or get tired – like humans do. Before autonomous vehicles can be fully safe for all road conditions, the Rand Corp and McKinsey estimated that one trillion road miles worth of data needs to be collected.

No single entity will be able to reach one trillion miles in the near future individually, but the sharing of data within the mobility ecosystem could bring autonomous cars to reality faster.