Decentralized Data Collection via Swarm Contracts: Study on Crowd-Sourced Google Maps

摘要

“Data is the new oil” has become a popular catch-phrase in the world of technology, emphasizing the immense value of data in today's digital age. Most services and platforms rely on data, but collecting this data can be challenging and costly. To address this issue, we leverage a novel distributed crowdsourcing framework - termed Swarm Contracts - that utilizes blockchain and is applied to robotics technologies. The framework encourages an incentivized crowdsourcing model through open-source robots and a secure, decentralized, and transparent blockchain-based incentive system. As a demonstration of the framework's capabilities, we use it to collect Google Street View <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">®</sup> map data, which can be a resource-intensive task to keep up to date using traditional centralized methods. Our Swarm Contract framework uses Google Street View <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">®</sup> Publish API, which allows for the contribution of street view data to Google Maps @to implement the incentive-based crowdsourcing of street view images. By incorporating a swarm contract-powered framework with the Google Street View <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">®</sup> Publish API, we show that the incentivized crowdsourcing of street view data can be a practical solution to maintain accurate and up-to-date Google Street View <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">®</sup> maps.