Hail-A-Comet

Inspiration

UT Dallas welcomes students from around the world to study in over 140 degree programs. That is more than 5,000 international students, from over 100 countries. A significant portion of the student body operate without a private vehicle, depending on the comet cruiser (University shuttle) for daily commute. In Spite of the highly accessible shuttle service, students often need to travel to places outside the bus route, or out of service hours on weekends. Being International graduate students ourselves, this is a problem that we relate to on a personal level.

What it does

Hail-A-Comet is a rideshare service that connects comets in need of a ride to comets with covetable rides ;). The process is made efficient by matching students based on their path to destination. The passenger’s path is compared with the driver’s using Google Maps SDK to find if they carrefour. Hail-A-Comet promises trust and security among comets and is completely volunteer based.

How we built it

Hail-A-comet is an android app that was built with intentions to be integrated as a feature to the UTDallas mobile app. It was built using Google Map sdk and a flask backend.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of building an application that has the potential to become a part of the UTD Life and undoubtedly impact the lives of students to make it easier.

What we learned

We had the opportunity to learn about APIs and make use of the google maps sdk and polyutil, which checks if a geolocation (lat, long) lies on a path(an encoded string representing a path on a map from point A to point B). [Thankful for some mind boggling mathematics made easy]

What's next for Hail-A-Comet

The next feature that could be added to this application is to match comets looking to ride in the same route so they can cabpool when there are no comet drivers online.