Smart Ride

The automotive industry’s traditional business models are being challenged as we speak. While technological breakthroughs have enabled vehicles to be more and more connected and increasingly autonomous, the traditional business models of car manufacturers need to change accordingly. Cars turn into digital platforms and therefore digital services and digital content in and around the car become more important than the car itself. A friction-less transfer of value and assets is a prerequisite for this digital economy around machines and IOTA is the technology to build the tools for it.Real-time zero fee payments, secure data transfer and immutable data storage unlock the potential of connected and autonomous vehicles, e-Mobility, Urban Mobility & new Mobility Services.

The need for new tools for a new economy becomes even more apparent with the prospect of autonomous vehicles. Eventually they could become their own economic agents with their own wallet and their own money.

Vehicles will be able to pay autonomously for parking, for charging their batteries, for tolls, and for any other service one could imagine. In order to pay for these services they will on the other hand need to earn monetary value by for example transporting people and goods. With electric vehicles and renewable energies becoming the new standard, vehicles will also be able to earn by participating in P2P energy trading and thereby help stabilise energy grids that see the share of renewable energies rapidly increasing.

To make this concept a reality, we need a smart system capable to managing the transactions in a decentralised paradigm with peer-to-peer networking so that various machines can interact and make payments autonomously. IOTA is a perfect example for the same.

IOTA is a distributed ledger technology that allows computers in an IOTA network to transfer immutable data and value among each other. Each node in an IOTA network validates transactions, then sends them to other nodes that do the same. As a result, all valid transactions are agreed on by all nodes, removing the need to trust a single one in the network.

IOTA uses the Tangle for its transaction medium. The Tangle is the data structure that's formed by the connections among transactions in the ledger. These connections allow an IRI node to traverse transactions and validate them.

With IOTA we can build tools for a friction-less machine to machine communication and eventually an economy between cars and their immediate -connected- environment, for example smart homes and smart infrastructure. IOTA enables peer-to-peer asset transfer and monetary exchange without central intermediaries.

The benefits of IOTA are: Trust, Immutability, Security, Scalability & Cost saving

The way we move in cities is changing. Advances in technology and new mobility services make travelling in cities safer and more efficient. Sharing instead of owning vehicles becomes more and more popular.

This project deals in the development of an IOTA payment system suitable for a wide variety of tasks for the transportation sector

Keywords: IOTA, Tangle, Smart Ride, Micro-transaction, cryptocurrency

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Workflow

The whole project revolves around the IOTA ecosystem and Raspberry Pi hardware interfacing. The project is now split into Use case, Hardware and software parts.

Use case

Lets consider an use case scenario for our project.

• Collecting IOTA tokens:

Consider that we own an autonomous vehicle and is available to be used for taxi or ride sharing. We create an interactive interface for interacting with the customer who wants to use our vehicle for a ride to his destination.

Inside the vehicle, the customer enters his destination in the input panel of the display and interaction panel. The algorithm computes the shortest viable path to the destination and the chargeable amount which will be converted to IOTA tokens. A QR code is auto generated using the information and is presented to the customer via the display panel.

The customer scans the QR code and pays the required amount to the address. Once the payment is confirmed, the journey starts to his destination.

This scenario can be extended to transport goods also.

• Spending IOTA tokens:

The autonomous vehicle can spend the IOTA tokens at utility services such as toll booths, charging ports, parking lots, platooning etc.

In this scenario, the vehicle camera module will scan the QR code generated by the initiator and the corresponding payment is carried out either autonomously or with the consent of the vehicle owner.

Hardware Implementation

The hardware implementation of the Smart Ride project includes the interfacing of various devices to the Raspberry Pi so as to control them via a relay on the basis of the IOTA transaction value.

The Raspberry Pi 3 B+ is used whose pin out diagram is as follows:

The customer interaction is performed using a camera and a display module integrated to the Raspberry Pi via the CSI port and I2C interface or DSI port respectively.

A 4 channel 5v Relay module was used. Any relay module can be used as long as they allow 5v trigger. Only one channel is used in this project for the demo.

Make the connections as follows:

Rpi 4 --> Relay 5v

Rpi 6 --> Relay Gnd

Rpi 40 --> Relay trigger

Connect the appliance to the power socket via the Relay output channel as shown in the interfacing diagram.

In our case, the controlled element can be a car door, e-charging station, toll billing machine etc.

Connect the camera to the Rpi CSI port and Display module to the I2C port as shown below.

Rpi 3 --> Display Module SDA

Rpi 5 --> Display Module SCL

Multiple relay channels can be used to control more devices at a later stage.

SoftwareImplementation

The IOTA platform can be found officially as Javascript, Java and Golang libraries with community support to Python and C# libraries. This project uses the Python library client API to realise the goal and to add extra layer of scalability and ease of usage.

PyOTA is the python client library of IOTA. It implements both the official API, as well as newly-proposed functionality (such as signing, bundles, utilities and conversion).

Tip 1# Recommends to use the virtualenv.

Install the latest version of PyOTA:

pip install pyota

PyOTA has an optional C extension that improves the performance of its cryptography features significantly.

pip install pyota[ccurl]

The algorithm flow is as follows:

• The IOTA node and address initialisation

iotaNode = "https:#nodes.thetangle.org:443"
  
address = [Address(b'DESCRIBEYOURADDRESSHERE')]

• Balance check

balance_result = iota_obj.get_balances(address)
	balance = balance_result['balances']
	return (balance[0])

• Activation / Deactivation

gpio.output(40, gpio.HIGH)
	gpio.output(38, gpio.HIGH)
	gpio.output(36, gpio.HIGH)
	gpio.output(32, gpio.HIGH)
	time.sleep(5)
	gpio.output(40, gpio.LOW)
	gpio.output(38, gpio.LOW)
	gpio.output(36, gpio.LOW)
	gpio.output(32, gpio.LOW)

As the camera and display modules are secondary functionalities, the smart ride module can perform without these.

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Testing

A basic prototype has been setup to test the functionality of the proposed project.

Final Assembly:

Module in action:

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Planned Future Modifications

• Interface the camera and display modules completely to create a full customer interaction.
• Facility to check the status of the vehicle, trip, IOTA wallet etc using an android app or website connected to data streamed from Raspberry Pi.

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Will be back with more....