Instant Car-Pooling on the Android Platform

CS 8803 AIAD enclosure sound take inion narration team2 CS 8803 AIAD Project Report. Instant Car-kittying on the android Plat skeletal frame Vinaya Shenoy Parikshit Sudumbrekar Madhura Tipnis 1 CS 8803 AIAD TERM contrive breed aggroup2 set back of Contents Introduction Objectives Motivation technology Over take in Related Work computer architecture Project Screen-Shots Evaluation Future Work Project Experience oddment References 3 3 3 4 5 5 6 14 14 15 16 17T sufficient of recruits formula 1 humanoid Technological Overview telephone number 2 Car pussycat exercise get-go Window Figure 3 Carpool practise ca-ca a virgin Event Figure 4 Carpool lotion Contact List Figure 5 Carpool Application Events Created history Figure 6 Carpool Application SMS for elevator c adapted rail political machinepool invitation received Figure 7 Carpool Application Car pool Invitation detail Figure 8 Carpool Application Details for the fount author Figure 9 Carpool Applicatio n chromosome mapping showing pick-up points 4 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 2 CS 8803 AIAD TERM labour key out team up2 Introduction With increasing convergence between several(predicate) technologies alike the cellular world, internet (IP) world, different diligences accept become prevalent and umpteen more are under break awayment. One of the prominent usefulnesss popular amongst the exploiters is the Location Based Services and presence. The current perspective-establish returns come forward in that respect in the market use the policy of broadcasting locations date enabling any activity between the unhomogeneous substance ab drug exploiters. This may study to unintended recipients being the beneficiary of certain takes.With this in mind, we channelize to burgeon forth an employment/service that would enable selective deli precise of lawsuits/ inwardnesss to the intended recipients found on their location. This would table service in avoiding thousands of nub s being sent to unintended recipients. Thus, non only the location of the intended recipient is taken into consideration unless the circumstance of the location is also taken into consideration. In this purpose, we define the condition of the recipient as its distance from the provoker of the event. Objectives The objectives of the Instant Car Pooling Application? bath be stated as follows 1.Enable exploiters to create events that would specify the adjacent breeding? The total va quite a exactcy in the cable car. ? The era at which the event is going to take place. ? The Final terminus. 2. Development of the logic that would enable? pate in the location information of any the intended recipients. ? Take conclusiveness based on the context on the location. ? Send sms? to all the selected recipients and shell out the accepted or rejected messages received from the recipients. 3. Generate a Google interpret that shows the firebrand the map between his location, all the recipients that agreed to his car pooling event and the final destination.We aim to demonstrate all these scenarios on the mechanical man impersonator?. Motivation The application under consideration, the Instant Car Pooling? application, is a sweet idea which has never been implemented before. This became our ejaculate of motivation for going forwards with this project. All the current car pooling methods are 1. Time consuming. 2. Require a lot of before-hand planning. 3. Require several rounds of communications in the form of serial of e-mails or a series of telephonic conversations. 3 CS 8803 AIAD TERM PROJECT REPORT TEAM2 Also, there seems to be an absence seizure of a Car Pooling? pplication on the prompt rallys. This motivated us to develop our application on the android Platform? , one of the upcoming and current mobile weapons platforms launched by Google. A different source of motivation arsehole the development of this application is that of the Georgia Tech India Club?. All the members of this auberge complained about receiving thousands of mails which either requested for a Car Pool or which offered a Car Pool. Thus, uninterested students used to receive such mails. We archetype why not develop a mobile-based instant Car Pooling application? s our gift to the student community of Georgia Tech? This au indeedtically gave us the passion to go aft(prenominal) the completion of this project. The initiator of the event could select intended recipients from the contact rock. The application then checks for the relative context of the location of all the selected recipients and forwards the event to only those recipients that satisfy the context. Technology Overview Figure 1 Android Technological Overview Android is a bare-ass operating system for the G1 anticipate that has been released by Google in 2008.The master(prenominal) disagreement that sets the Google G1 phone apart from separate operating systems is that the Android is b ased on an open source platform. This imp lie ins that anyone seat view and even modify the source code. This results in constant evolution of the parcel. In case a developer senses that there is a certain feature that is currently not included then he or she butt incorporate it in the phone and the software would develop. Since it is a fairly tender platform, it is not as 4 CS 8803 AIAD TERM PROJECT REPORT TEAM2 substantial as opposite mobile operating systems.But considering the open source nature and former(a) features, it can go a long way beyond other mobile operating systems. The hardware associated with the phone is provided by various companies. As and when the hardware becomes more advanced, the Android OS bequeath be able to support more features functions. Related Work 1. Location tracking is the around essential thing and a definite pre requisite for any mobility tie in application. This can be done in different ways. 2. A social beast has been developed which helps the drug user connect with people around him. This tool has been developed on the Symbian Operating System.The location of the user is detected in the cell phone by getting information from the cell tower. This application doesn? t need GPS. Each user can keep up with what is happening with people in the friend? s be prone. Broadcasting of messages is the sexual climax followed in this tool. It also provides other features like connecting people with similar interests. It helps the user explore various places in and around the location detected. 3. There is a mobile social networking service called Loopt which broadcasts the location of the user even when the phone is closed.It also allows sending of messages or sharing of photos between contacts. This Loopt is currently circumscribed to the Sprint network. Architecture The users that withstand this application installed on their cell phones can use this application as either initiators of car pooling event or as cha rmes for a car pooling event. When the user launches this application, the user is make watern terzetto options to choose from. The user can create a new car pool event, view the events that he has created earlier or view invitations for car pool event from other users.When the user chooses to create a new event, he is given a form which has fields such as subject of the car pool, sentence of the car pool, vacancies in the car, destination utter of the car pool, and a button to choose from the list of his contacts. The user enters the value in the fields and then clicks on the contact list. The contact list is pomposityed from which the user selects the contacts he wants to send the invitation of the car pool to. All the invitees will be sent an SMS with the flesh out of the carpool event.When the invitee accepts an invitation, the carpool application on his phone will respond back to the initiator with the current GPS location of the invitee. When the initiator gets back the positive reply from an invitee, he will retrieve the location co-ordinates from the sms and using reverse geocoding functionality of the Geocoder utility will calculate the street hail of the contact. Now when the initiator views the event generated, he can see all those who all dumbfound responded to the event. A Google map is created with the locations of all those who have responded to the event.It gives the ordain of pick up as per the order in which the invitees have responded. We have used the Google constitute API here for 5 CS 8803 AIAD TERM PROJECT REPORT TEAM2 generation of the alley map based on the location as detected by the geo coder. in one case the vacancies are full, the other invitees who try to accept the invite later are displayed a message which says that the car is full. Project Screenshots Figure 2 Carpool Application Starting Window This is the beginning(a) screen that appears on the cell phone display when the user starts the application. There are th ree options that are provided.They are ? ? ? Create an event This allows the user to start a new car pool. arrest created events This allows the user to go back and view the car pool events that have been created earlier by him. View Invitations This option lets the user view invitations for other car pooling events from his friends. 6 CS 8803 AIAD TERM PROJECT REPORT TEAM2 Figure 3 Carpool Application Create a new Event This screen appears on the cell phone display when the user chooses to create a new car pooling event. In the subject box, the user can type out a short description of the advise of the car pool.Since it is an instant car pooling application, the twenty-four hours is set to the current day as recorded in the cell phone. The user is given a list of cadences to select from when he clicks on the pick a time option. Also the user is allowed to specify the number of vacancies in his car to go to a particular destination. The user enters his destination summarize ress in the destination 7 CS 8803 AIAD TERM PROJECT REPORT TEAM2 box. Then the user can select contacts from his contact list to whom all the event will be sent to. Figure 4 Carpool Application Contact List This screen is the contact list.The user can select the contacts he wishes to send the car pool event invite to, with the help of check boxes provided next to the names of the contacts. When the user clicks on add to event, the invitation is sent to the selected contacts from the contact list. This event is sent in the form of a sms?. 8 CS 8803 AIAD TERM PROJECT REPORT TEAM2 Figure 5 Carpool Application Events Created history This screen is displayed on the cell phone display when the user chooses to view the car pool events created by him. The user can click on the individual events to view the details of all(prenominal) event.This list contains all the past events as intimately as the pending events. 9 CS 8803 AIAD TERM PROJECT REPORT TEAM2 Figure 6 Carpool Application SMS for carpool invitation received When the message is sent to the contacts, the message as shown above appears on the display of the contacts to which the message is sent. The name of the car pool event generator also appears in the message pop up. 10 CS 8803 AIAD TERM PROJECT REPORT TEAM2 Figure 7 Carpool Application Car Pool invitation details When the user clicks on view invitation option on the main page, the user is displayed the screen above.The invitation gives details of the car pool which includes the subject of the car pool, the name of the initiator of the event, the time at which the car pool is schedule to take place, the destination of the car pool and the status of the reply. The user is given to options to respond to the message of either attending or not attending. The user can click on either one depending on his choice. Once the user responds to a message he won? t be given an option to change his decision. 11 CS 8803 AIAD TERM PROJECT REPORT TEAM2 Figure 8 Carpoo l Application Details for the event creatorThis page will be displayed to the user who created the events. It will give him a summary of the event with details such as the subject, the time of the event, vacancies in the car, destination of the car pool, invitees to the event, and the order of magazine of the invitees who responded. The order of magazine is decided on first come first serve can currently. Also the user is given an option to check the map of the highway now by clicking on show route map. 12 CS 8803 AIAD TERM PROJECT REPORT TEAM2 Figure 9 Carpool Application Map showing pick-up pointsThe route map is displayed to the creator of the car pool event when he clicks on the show route map option. Along the route, the pick-ups in the order of first come first serve are plotted. The interesting thing about this application is that in the beginning when no recipient has accepted the invitation, the initiator of the event can view a map of source (his location) and the fi nal destination. As and when recipients accept the car pooling invitation, the map is updated and it shows all the intermediate pick-up points (the locations of the recipients who have accepted the car pooling invitation).Thus, the initiator of the event now has the entire map, wherein he has all the information about the route to follow. 13 CS 8803 AIAD TERM PROJECT REPORT TEAM2 Evaluation/Testing We seeked our application by running four instances of the emulator on the same machine. In each emulator we stored three contacts with their numbers being the port numbers on which the other three emulators were running. We then tested the following scenario 1. When a user creates a new event, the event is created properly ensuring that all the parameters are valid. For eg, the user can? put a time in the future or put a negative vacancy, give no invitees. Also, we verify the destination cover provided by the user to ensure that the address is correct and exists on the map. 2. Once the event is created, we verified that all the invitees got an sms message with the proper details and the invitation is displayed in their invitation list. 3. When an invitee accepts an invitation a reply sms with his GPS coordinates is sent back to the initiator. 4. When the initiator gets a accept response, the event is updated and the initiator can see the pickup location of the invitee on the map. . When the carpool for an invite becomes full, all invitees who respond after that get a carpool full response sms. Future Work This project provides a proof of concept of the Car Pooling? application. It is a stripped tidy sum version of our dream Car Pool? application. There are a lot of improvements that can be incorporated into this project that makes it more effect and feature rich. The future work with regards to this project can be summarized as follows 1. Currently, the initiator sends car pooling invitation to his friends from his contact list.Their location is forwarded back to him when they accept the invitation. This helps in the creation of the Google Map for the event initiator. In the future, we could have a wind vane service that handles all this location information. This would also solve some secrecy related issues like the publishing of recipient location etc. 2. At the moment, the routes are decided on the First Come First behave? basis. This means, the route is decided on the order in which the recipients accept the car pooling invitation. But the path obtained from this may not always be the shortest path.Thus we could have algorithms like the Dijkstra? s? algorithm or Algorithmic concepts like propellent Programming? to calculate the shortest path between source, destination and all the recipients. Thus, optimization on this front can be obtained. 3. The web service can be programmed to handle the context of the location. The context of the location can be determined by its proximity to the location of the event creator. Thus, the web s ervice can determine a radius and determine the recipients which fall at bottom the 14 CS 8803 AIAD TERM PROJECT REPORT TEAM2 adius as the ones who would receive the car pooling event message while those which lie outside the radius would be ignored. Thus, broadcasting of the event can be avoided. 4. Other features can include displaying only the events that are pending when the user clicks on the View Created Events? button. All the past and completed events could be stored in a separate history log?. 5. Currently, the final destination need the complete address of the location. In the future, the final destination address could be populated by extracting information from the subject? of the event and using Google Maps functionalities.For example, if the user types in Trip to Wal-Mart? as the subject, then the final destination address could be filled automatically by the closest Wal-Mart store laid near him. Project Experience Working on the project was a learning process with a lot of interesting discoveries. The Android platform being comparatively new was a challenge to work on, since very less documentation was available as well as little support was available done with(predicate) the online communities. During the initial phase of the project, all the various APIs that were supported were studied to determine their use and feasibility towards the project.During this initial feasibility study, we realized that certain API support have been removed from the latest version of Android. This included the crucial one of Google Maps, which our project was dependent on. Thus, began another(prenominal) study to determine the use of actual Google Map APIs through the Android code. Also the basic idea of the project made us realize that how convenient car pooling can be made with this application. The project exposed us to the latest technology in the area of mobile platform development. In class the various issues in mobile compute were covered.Also there w as an extensive explanation of mobile computing in general. This discussion helped us a lot in the project. We realized that issues such as less power on the device, etc. can be a problem if there are huge amounts of countings to be done. Thus, we made a point to keep the client as this as possible and with this aim in mind, we also aim to develop a web service in the future that would completely take care of all the computation and make the clients really thin?. Location based services were extensively covered in the class. This motivated us to incorporate them into our project.We have extensively used locations in our project, in fact we have the plotted the Google Map by making use of them. Due to such background developed in class, we thought of experimenting on the Android platform. It gave us a set ahead to explore the yet not totally discovered areas in Android API usage. 15 CS 8803 AIAD TERM PROJECT REPORT TEAM2 Initially we wanted to test the project by executing instanc es of the Android emulator on different machines. These emulators would then communicate between each-other through means of messages. But, we were not able to demonstrate in this fashion callable to certain technological challenges.In the end, we demonstrated the application by executing different instances of the Android emulator on the same machine. We further aim to test the performance of our application by adding a number of recipients and measuring the time taken for the Google Map to build. This would help us in determining whether the time remains for large number of recipients, finding the bottle-necks if any and moving towards a cut-off for the number of recipients for which the application shows normal execution time. Conclusion Thus, this project successfully demonstrated a mobile based Car Pooling? application.This application would help in the process of creation of instant car pool? events. Thus, we successfully reduced the long conversations needed for normal car p ool events. In future, more functionality can be added to make this application more robust and more feature rich. With the advent of smart phones, this application, when developed to its fullest, would be able for all to use and make their journeys much more enjoyable and comfortable. 16 CS 8803 AIAD TERM PROJECT REPORT TEAM2 References 1. Android API documentation. (n. d. ). Retrieved from Android Developers http//developer. ndroid. com/reference/packages. html 2. Android Development Community meeting place (n. d). Retrieved April 2009 from http//www. anddev. org/index. php 3. Google Maps API documentation. (n. d. ). Retrieved from Google maps http//code. google. com/apis/maps/documentation/ 4. Strickland, J. (n. d. ). How the Google Phone Works. Retrieved April 2009, from How Stuff Works http//electronics. howstuffworks. com/google-phone5. htm 5. What is Android. (n. d. ). Retrieved April 2009, from developer. android. com http//developer. android. com/guide/ rudiments/what-is- android. html 17