A Beginner’s Guide on a Decentralized Infrastructure for the Future Transportation on the Blockchain.

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DAV standing for Decentralized Autonomous Vehicles is an open-source, peer-to-peer global transportation software platform aimed to unite every person and every machine involved in transferring people and objects from one place to another in a single system. In a word, DAV is all about buying or selling autonomous transportation services using the DAV token.

Passengers can use this marketplace to find an autonomous or manned vehicle; vehicles (and drivers, of course) can use it to find charging stations or a maintenance/repair service center nearby, while developers can use DAV’s open protocol to contribute their unique value to the network (such as route planning apps, data sharing, etc). Connecting self-driving and manned vehicles (air, water, and ground, including drones, surely), users, and related services, DAV empowers everyone to have a network of on-demand vehicles at their disposal.

How will DAV work?

With more people and organizations opting for autonomous (self-driving) vehicles, having an autonomous vehicle infrastructure can’t hurt, claims the DAV’s team. With this in mind, DAV decided to develop open-source software with an intuitive user interface for a truly autonomous, quickly-scaling transportation system.

The technology behind DAV is presented by five major elements:

The Identity stack. It will enable users and vehicles to authenticate each other on the network.
Decentralized Discovery Tools will help different autonomous vehicles to discover clients, service providers or each other in a decentralized way.
Decentralized Communication. Standardized communication protocols will ensure a direct communication between DAV users and facilitate cooperation between them (for example, a vehicle – charging station scenario).
Decentralized Mission Flow will ensure a smooth exchange of services between DAV participants at every instance of a process – from the need bidding and service fulfillment to a subsequent payment. All these instances will be executed off-blockchain through a P2P communication while being governed by blockchain smart-contracts.
Decentralized Payment grants reward for a successfully completed mission using an ERC-20 token DAV.

Creating the Internet of Transportation, DAV expects that autonomous vehicle manufacturers will allow DAV to integrate their software with newly-minted autos. It is supposed that such software will communicate with a vehicle using its APIs to give instructions, transmit telemetry data, etc. Existing driverless vehicles are made in such a way that they also allow third-party applications to be installed with their IVI (though, with certain permissions). Even if attempts to negotiate with carmakers fail, the DAV Company already has software that can exist outside of a transport, such as on a remote server or in a form of an aftermarket device, which can easily be attached to the vehicle.

DAV’s Use Cases

The team hopes that their product will be helpful for the following groups:

Ordinary consumers. Using DAV tokens, the users can enjoy on-demand transportation services to move goods or people from some point A to some point B.
Vehicle providers. They can earn money by making their vehicles available on-demand in the DAV system for delivery and transfer missions.
Infrastructure providers can make tokens if they provide battery replacement, docking, or charging equipment.
Service providers are incentivized with DAV tokens for maintenance services and for finding and retrieving DAV vehicles in case they are lost or damaged.
Carmakers will also be granted with DAV tokens for installing DAV software into their vehicles and for assembling DAV-compatible decentralized transport devices.
Insurance companies are welcome to offer insurance policies on-demand for DAV participants (cars, consumers or parcels).
Arbitrators will resolve disputes through smart-contracts and receive a reward.
Hardware & Software developers can participate in the growth of DAV platform or introduce their own custom services/apps to the system, thus making it more efficacious.

DAV Prototypes

Loud words are not very persuasive. To foster massive adoption and popularity, DAV’s team has already built several prototypes of their to-be decentralized autonomous transportation marketplace. Most significant releases include:

Missions App. It is the first application built on the base of DAV. The program connects people wanting to ship their parcels with autonomous drones. Its Github repository is https://github.com/DAVFoundation/missions.
Command Line Interface (CLI) is a tool making the development of DAV-friendly applications and services easier: https://github.com/DAVFoundation/dav-cli.
DAV Block Explorer allows developers who create apps and services on the base of DAV to try their products on Ethereum Testnets: https://github.com/DAVFoundation/xplore.
Mission Control is a smart contract connecting DAV service buyers and sellers while keeping track of the platform’s users/vehicles/services: https://github.com/DAVFoundation/missioncontrol.
n3m0. It is an autonomous boat being developed by DAV together with the California Maritime University for photography missions: https://github.com/DAVFoundation/n3m0.
ROSBot is still under works. It will be a search and rescue rover to help out lost or damaged drones: https://husarion.com/#rosbot.

DAV Team

DAV managed to attract brilliant minds in the sphere of the blockchain, crypto-economics, aviation, aerospace, internet technology, and the automobile industry. Their team of developers and advisors is so big that we will highlight only DAV’s founders and chief officers.

Noam Copel is a chief executive officer and founder with a sophisticated expertise in blockchain, encryption, and cryptocurrencies. He is the father of the 1st smartphone encryption system in the world.

Tal Ater is a chief technical operator and co-founder. He boasts decades of successful expertise as a lead developer in many famous open-source projects and also currently works as an invited expert on the W3C Automotive Working Group.

John Frazer is a chief customer officer and co-founder with a solid CV stating that he worked for Ethereum Foundation as the External Relations lead and was a senior member of the Devcon3 team. He also has finished the MBA program from Royal Roads University in Victoria, Canada.

Joe Lopardo is a chief marketing officer and co-founder. He is very competent in the questions of blockchain and cryptocurrency with years of experience in such gigantic corporations as Google, Oracle, Salesforce, and SAP where he helped with the brand development and the implementation of marketing strategies.

Tokensale

DAV Network ICO: 11 - 25 june
Token Ticker: DAV
Protocol: Ethereum, ERC20
Token Sale Hard Cap: 38,000,000 USD

Conclusion

Though the world’s number of transportation services tends to be endless, DAV is a pioneer project with its attempt to create a platform to unite unmanned vehicles like self-driving cars and drones. By putting identity, discovery, mission flow, and payment processes on the top of the blockchain, DAV enables peer-to-peer transfers of people and physical objects from place to place. DAV will essentially be a marketplace of decentralized autonomous vehicles where users can pay DAV tokens to have a transfer or package delivery while other platform participants can earn DAV tokens for providing such a vehicle or related services on-demand.

DAV Additional Sources