Python | Google Maps API | Google Cloud Firebase

Github | Presentation

Event: TreeHacks 2020

Inspiration

Through our app, we hope to help undergraduates navigate locations on campus. As freshmen at large universities, getting lost on campus was an unnecessary burden for us, especially given all of the other adjustments we had to make entering college. Especially when visiting unfamiliar university campuses for hackathons, including TreeHacks, navigation is an unnecessary stress. Thus, we are building an application providing indoor navigation at universities.

What it does

uMaps is an iOS application that integrates Google Maps with an indoor map of buildings at university campuses. Using crowdsourced user data and public floor plans, uMaps provides a comprehensive map of rooms within buildings and provides a user walking directions between rooms, similar to how Google Maps provides directions between buildings. At TreeHacks, we developed a proof-of-concept that navigates a user from a default room to any other room in floors 0 and 1 of Huang Center.

How I built it

We developed a front-end interface with Swift, integrating Google Maps API with our indoor map. Using floor plans and manually mapped data of the Huang Center, we built a Firestore database of “squares” to represent rooms, hallways, and walls in the building. Through the implementation of the A* algorithm in our object-oriented Python backend, we provided an interface for users to query a location and obtain walking directions to a specific room in the Huang Center.