By Bradley Berman — Lead Editor

Flying a drone until now has been a hands-on endeavor — requiring people to oversee a launch, plot a course, charge batteries, and manually retrieve the hardware and data. As a result, the vast potential of unmanned aerial devices for deliveries, inspections, and extending Internet coverage has been constrained by the need for a human being to babysit each step of the process. That’s about to change after this week’s announcement that a drone in Berlin autonomously found an available battery-charging station and on its own booked a time for landing and charging. The drone then replenished its battery, paid for the charging using a smart contract, and promptly returned to the sky.

What made that momentous flight possible — and millions of future autonomous excursions to come — was the official launching of the DAV Network. As soon as the necessary hardware or software are placed on the DAV network, smart vehicles can use DAV’s blockchain protocol to autonomously make and execute transactions with one another. With the participation of its historic first users, the DAV network becomes the world’s first open-source commons for transport services.

One Small Flight for a Drone, One Giant Leap for Transportation

The profound consequences of this short flight cannot be overstated. It suddenly becomes possible for a drone to complete extended tasks without interruption or direct human attention. Drones that deliver goods and medicines, collect news footage, or relay data can now operate 24/7 — even in the most hazardous conditions. Moreover, a vast marketplace of drone-based services now opens up to everyday citizens, who can request aerial tasks even if the users have limited knowledge of drone operations.

Here’s what happened in Berlin: DAV engineers transitioned the network from a test environment to the live Ethereum Mainnet. Moments later, Skysense — the drone charging infrastructure provider — makes one of its ultra-fast drone-charging pads available on the DAV network. Using open-source software connected to Skysense software platform, the charging infrastructure “told” any drone also on the DAV network that it was open for business and ready to take appointments for a charging event. A drone participating in the test was placed on the live network then recognized the availability of that Skysense charging pad. The two parties — the drone and the charging infrastructure — used DAV’s communication protocols which serve as a common language between them to agree upon the time, place and cost for the charging event. The details of that agreement were immortalized in a smart contract on the blockchain, DAV tokens — a new form of cryptocurrency — were transferred from the Drone’s wallet to the smart contract, and the drone was on its way to the charger. Once the mission was complete, the DAV-token payment was released from the smart contract to the charger’s own crypto wallet.

With the move of DAV’s network from a Testnet to the Mainnet, the blockchain-based network and its protocols have been released into the universe as full-fledged open-source technology. The gates are now open for software developers, hardware producers, and transportation services to join the party — and start building an entire web of transportation services.

Skysense this week will make available five more charging stations on the DAV network, this time in Trento, Italy. Another player, Nevada-based GRADD, a maker of routing software, will begin offering mapping services to drones and other vehicles. Like all transactions on the DAV network, vehicles will pay GRADD or Skysense using DAV tokens.

The Skysense Charging Pad is the fastest drone charging solution on the market. Skysense is a Qualcomm Ventures-backed technology startup building an automated Drone Infrastructure for commercial applications. Among its customers are NASA, Thales, General Electrics and enterprises planning to operate drones at scale in the security, infrastructure, agriculture, and logistics markets

Tal Ater, DAV CTO, with the leaders of Skysense

“This represents only the first of many very exciting developments for the DAV Network,” said Tal Ater, the DAV Foundation’s chief technical officer. “Our engineering team is already working on the next major milestone.” The list of DAV milestones in the next year includes the launch of a decentralized, ride-hailing service on the DAV Network, integration with autonomous boats, and more to be announced.