Senior computer science majors Rodney Garland, Nick Scott, Wayne Henderson and Andrew Gray are working on the “Point 2 Point” GPS system for their senior project for their Computer Science 411 class, but hope to release it for use by students, faculty and staff once it is complete.
“We’ve been in development since the summer,” said Garland. “We talked a lot with Dr. Aaron Culotta, he’s our client and mentor. We came to him and he helped us flesh it out and gave us a better idea of how to make it there.”
The program makes routes by connecting nodes between the user and the destination with a straight line. If an impassable object interrupts the route, the system recalculates the route. According to Henderson, the program recognizes impassible objects, such as buildings, by using binary code. Open areas are recognized as a zero, impassable objects are recognized as a one.
Scott, who is in charge of the program’s user interface explained that the map of the campus will start out as a simple outline of buildings, but there are, plans to make it look more pleasing. The team also entertained the idea of a 3-D map, however, the A* Algorithm is only compatible with 2-D images.
The program operates on a server, which is maintained by Garland, Henderson and Gray, who is the vice president for the Southeastern chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). Henderson and Gray monitor the flow of information from users to the server and vice versa.
The prototype is planned to be complete by Oct. 13 and the final product will be completed some time before finals week. According to Garland, if the project does well, it may expand beyond campus.
“This is where it gets sketchy,” said Garland. “Right now were just doing it for the campus. I’m sure the ACM would help us get the word out, but we would have to go through the university because they technically own the