General Motors (GM) – car manufacturing heavyweight – has reportedly submitted an application to secure patent for its blockchain-based navigation map updating tool. 

Specifically, the patent, filed on October 1st 2 years ago and published on April 2nd this year, is for a system, harnessing blockchain’s features for data integration from vehicle sensors, and use it to design a trustworthy map, for autonomous cars. 

Per the patent, the currency maps employed in those types of vehicles appear to be “difficult to keep dynamic without incurring large costs”, as their scopes are determined by specialized vehicles – those that can only cover a few specific territories across the globe. 

General Motors plans for process distribution to numerous different vehicles, enabling data collection from the environments they are in, via sensors, upon their normal journey. The discrepancy detector would then be used to compare the data and allows for analysis of the current maps. 

The differences will then be transferred to a blockchain system, that provides storage for all the map data. The “candidate transaction” will be verified as soon as there is a resemblance in the changes shown by other vehicles. 

The patent revealed that vehicles and mining nodes in the data centers will be in charge of maintaining the network. 

The system was potentially built to to work for GM’s “Super Cruise” feature, which allows customers to know that automated driving feels like, on a few selected high-value models. 

The patent claimed that an advantage offered by the system is distributing the map generation process and enabling contribution from vendors to one particular map, hence the choice for blockchain.