ANav
Description:
Many cyclist around the world depend on social apps and themselves to discover bike paths that are popular in their area. It can be frustrating for someone who wants to explore new areas or someone who is injured but cant give up what they love doing. While most GPS systems today report shortest path from 2 points, many biking navigation systems do not factor change in elevations into the equation. Our project ANav aims to change this. ANav is an elevation based GPS that allows cyclist to pre-plan trips based on bike route intensity. Bikers can choose starting and and finishing positions and ANav will perform an A* graph search to retrieve the best path . Bikers can choose how "Hilly" they want their route to be. Using node information collected using openstreetmap and google cloud platform, ANav creates a undirected graph and performs the A* search algorithm with distance between nodes as a cost function and elevation as a weight. We believe that ANav has the potential to being one of the best cyclist companion apps out there.
Inspiration:
Josh is a biker and thought an everyday problem he faced needed a solution
What it does:
ANav is an elevation based GPS that allows cyclist to pre-plan trips based on bike route intensity. Bikers can choose starting and and finishing positions and ANav will perform an A* graph search to retrieve the best path . Bikers can choose how "Hilly" they want their route to be.
How we built it:
Using node information collected from openstreetmap and elevation for each node using google cloud platform, ANav creates an undirected graph and performs the A* search algorithm with distance between nodes as a cost function and elevation as a weight.
Challenges we ran into:
When collecting information from over 15,000 nodes (3 hours of data collection) we ran into program crashes which resulted in data loss. We were limited to the $100 google platform budget and running our data collection scripts for the area of Amherst costed about $75. We had to make sure we didnt use up to many free trials :)
Accomplishments that we're proud of:
Creating the optimization function that performed the A* search algorithm
What we learned:
Data mining is a very profitable business for companies. We also learned some of our weakness in web development since we are all backend programmers.
What's next:
We will be adding more options for bikers to fine tune how the bike path is generated and look for ways to improve our path calculation time.
Built with:
Python, javascript, openstreetmap api, google cloud platform api, flask, html, css,
Prizes we're going for:
Google Home Mini
TBI Pro Gaming Headset
$100 Amazon Gift Cards
Grand Prize
Misfit Shine 2