MapCoin: Community Effort for Data Collection

Digitalization & technological breakthrough, slowly but surely have reached a new stage. After the internet boom, blockchain and cryptocurrencies are now trying to revolutionize many sectors of our society. Not only that, the advance of artificial intelligence, integrated circuits or microchip, and video recognition also open up a possibility that never existed before, an autonomous or self-driving vehicle.

An autonomous vehicle is a transportation machine that has the capabilities to navigate and sense its environment without human input. They get their data automatically and decide what they will do automatically too via artificial intelligence. They'll navigate the road based on the program and data acquired from their environment recognition ability. In other words, they are able to sense when to stop, when to accelerate and how much acceleration needs to be applied, when to break and so on.

An autonomous vehicle such as a self-driving car is a major breakthrough in the transportation industry. With autonomous cars, human drivers don't have to put a lot of energy when they drive and at the same time minimize the risk of human errors in driving. A human driver, in theory, will only watch out how the car ride, just like a pilot when they set the plane in auto-pilot mode.

Uber self-driving cars, which has been allegedly killed a woman in March 2018. Source: Macrumors

But they're still far from perfect. Right now, we have to put a lot of effort to research and perfect it to make sure it is able to drive without any or limited errors. We don't want to make a faulty technology that in turn only cause catastrophic crash or failure that harms the driver and passenger.

At this moment, researchers have some prototype and development running for autonomous cars. Even after years of research, this machine is still far from perfect. There are many things to consider and built, including the resources that we have to use to develop autonomous vehicles. Not only that, there are some major challenges that we have to solve to developt autonomous vehicle & data-related technology to its fullest. And MapCoin is here to provide the necessary solution that we need.

The Challenges of Data Collection

Artificial intelligence & machine learning as the core of autonomous vehicles needs a lot of data. They need to be trained with millions or billions of data to make sure they can do their job properly. Just like a human, they work and categorize this data based on proximity or similarity. Those millions of data will help them train to identify and drive properly.

A visualization of self-driving cars. Source: Hackernoon

In an autonomous vehicle, they need a lot of data in order to recognize human, road, cars, tree, traffic condition, the speed of other cars and so on. The bigger & accurate the data that they learn, the faster, safer & accurate a self-driving car can ride. In fact, autonomous cars need HD maps that must have an accuracy of less than 20cm to make sure they can ride properly. Because of this, many companies such as Google has exerted a handful of resources to collect data. For example, they use their custom designed vehicle to generate a Google Map street view and also for autonomous vehicle development.

Data collection consume a great amount of time, human resource & money. The process is quite complex and sometimes too centralized at one or two companies. If this continues, a lot of resources could go to waste and there is a potential for data monopoly. On the other hand, there are a lot of poorly utilized resources, such as community or society in this process. If we can use community or people to generate data for autonomous cars or others device, a great deal of money & time could be saved and utilized for other development, while at the same time the risk of data centralization can be minimized.

MapCoin app for visual mapping.

Unfortunately, there is a problem with community mapping. There is no tangible incentive available for them. Most of us will think "why should I help this company get their data if there's nothing for me"? That's reasonable. When they're mapping or recording from their phone or another device, they're using their personal time & resource, which, economically can be utilized for other activities such as generating income. Compared to the former, using their devices for their own business is, of course, more profitable. And because of this, community mapping usually end with failure or invalid data.

Collective Effort for Data Collection

MapCoin is a blockchain & cryptocurrency project that aims to solve the problems of data collection, especially in autonomous vehicle database. After reading the whitepaper, we can get the gist that MapCoin aims to utilize community effort in order to collect the necessary data for mapping. Every companies or user can request others to map a specific route and they'll get rewards with MapCoin token. Not only that, a regular user can also participate in regular mapping, they can turn on their device to pass through their regular route and still got tokens for their activities.

How MapCoin works

If we take a look from another perspective, MapCoin will maximize the community resources. It gives the community the reward they deserved, and give them the opportunity to participate in the future development of autonomous vehicle & data mapping. At the same time, this will decrease the amount of money, time & human resources for data collection of a single, which tend to be poorly utilized. In another word, MapCoin will help companies/transportation industry to focus on their self-driving cars program or hardware development, rather than running around on the street.

All of that will be possible with the application of blockchain and cryptocurrencies for data mapping. With blockchain & cryptocurrencies, the community will be able to take part to review transactions and get rewarded as soon as possible. There will be no complex rewards claim because everything will be done instantly via smart contract & blockchain.

Bottom Line

Data mapping is a difficult task to do alone, on the other hand, it is very important for artificial intelligence & machine learning, including the development of self-driving cars. A community effort is a cheap but effective solution to solve the problems that currently exist in the data mapping industry. MapCoin is the platform that will play a key role in community collective mapping & data collection.

Note: This article is not a financial recommendation. The author, MapCoin and other parties mentioned in this article is a separate entity. The author writes this article based on his own understanding of MapCoin and in order to get reward with MapCoin tokens as part of participation in MapCoin bounty program at Bounty0x (writer username on the platform is joniboini16). Readers should read the original document of MapCoin by themselves. The author shouldn't be responsible for any actions taken by the readers, including but not limited to: joining MapCoin bounty program, participate in MapCoin token sale, and etc.
Important links that you should check:

MapCoin Medium = https://medium.com/@Mapcointoken/
Website Link: https://mapcoin.io
Whitepaper Link: https://mapcoin.io/documents/mapcoin-en.pdf