We’re happy to be able to announce that after getting Joachim Taiber as advisor to the IOTA Foundation, that we’ve now officially partnered with the International Transportation Innovation Center (ITIC), to collaborate with them to work on autonomous vehicle testbeds.

In this blog post, we’ll delve a bit deeper into what we’re doing here, that further fosters the IOTA ecosystem, but also goes beyond distributed ledgers alone.

Powering the future of Mobility

Testbeds enable the incubation of cutting-edge technology, so that we can work on rapidly innovating and further iterating it to reach a production-ready stage. We need to ensure that the future of Mobility, and the Internet of Things is Secure, Safe, and fully Autonomous.

The ITIC is a non-profit foundation which specializes in developing open and close autonomous vehicle testbeds globally. Through such a global network of testbeds, we can enable faster acceleration of the technology that is supposed to power the mobility of tomorrow. With IOTA, we want to be one of the technologies that will also be tested and further integrated into these autonomous vehicle testbeds.

With the partnership with ITIC, we aim at simulating certain applications and business models, to determine their feasibility out and further improve upon the concepts. A recent example of our work in this area is the Smart Mobility Simulator, that will go live in January and make it possible to setup a smart charging infrastructure, with vehicles and charging stations interacting with each other through the IOTA network.

Doing similar work, just with a specific focus on autonomous vehicles makes it possible for us to more closely in real-life testing environments where the future technology of our mobility network is being tested at. Integrating IOTA into the vehicle is our ultimate goal after all. ITIC will also collaborate with IOTA on the Data Marketplace for sharing and selling testbed data. A previous example of some of the work that we’ve done together with ITIC and NetObjex is on dynamic inductive charging for electric vehicles.

Something else that’s very exciting: the ITIC, and specifically Joachim Taiber, will be working more closely with us on the Ecosystem Fund of IOTA. We will come up with a structure to help fund the future ecosystem of smart mobility applications and infrastructure. We’ll release more details along the way.