I am in the process of planning an app that includes a feature that requires it to record and store the exact route a user takes while driving. Is there any location api that supports this out of the box? Or supports detecting a turn? I was initially hoping for an event triggered by the user turning onto a different road, but so far, no such luck.
I think you may try this way:
1 Request for GPS location update every 30s ,you can do this with Timer and TimerTask ,and LocationManager;
2 You can get the road name through Google Map API with the GPS location you get;
3 So you will get to know whether the user is turning onto a different road every 30 seconds.
I believe I have found a solution that makes use of the other answer here. I will post it as a separate answer though as it adds more to the other answer and is a full solution. As Ai Hao said, I could have my app request an updated location every 30 seconds to determine whether the user is on a new road, and then place a waypoint signalling the turn. However, this method is flawed if the mapping algorithm used (and I do not have the expertise to write my own) detects multiple possible routes. My solution to this issue is to store all location responses until a turn is made. This means that when a turn is detected, the oldest location data will be the last turn, while the newest will correspond to the turn being made. The app will request alternate routes, and if any are found, will calculate a route between the second oldest and second most recent coordinates, until no alternate routes are found. This should result in the exact route that the user took.
Related
There may be similar questions regarding this topic,But I need your thoughts and suggestions on some specific requirement.
Here is my need -
We are developing one app which tracks User's trip.
The app will start collecting the location of that user in background,When user 'Starts' his trip from App.Background Service will be fetching locations on the basis of user's movement in specific time duration.
When User 'Stops' his trip from App,We are calculating distance traveled by user with help of all recorded locations(With Google Distance calculating API).
The App works fine in ideal case.
But main challenge is -
In some scenarios,We are not able to fetch exact and precise location of User. Scenarios affecting is - No internet,Data plan with 2g/3g,some specific areas where GPS is not returning accurate data etc.
Incorrect data of lat-long causes incorrect Trip distance and route.Which is main problem with the App.
Please,any one can suggest the best alternative/Suggestion for this?
P.S. - We have tried GPS,Network,FusedLocationProvider.
EDIT 2 --
We have implemented logic on basis of accuracy and distances.Got nearer points. And just came across one useful api from Google that corrects some location points which are distracted from actual Roads. Posting here for reference of others...
Snap to Roads Api from Google
this is a complicated topic.
One consideration you have to take. Android Oreo limits background services and that what you want to achieve won't work.
I would do is this (and it is the recommendation from Google)
When someone starts the trip (the user is aware of it), you must launch a on going notification with a foreground service , don't rely on background services anymore. Check the feature "Start Activity" in Google Fit App.
As for not having signal, or accurate GPS, well... it is a geographical problem!, there is nothing you could do. Or, maybe you can, using the LocationProvider.
FusedLocationProvider is fused within every app that requests locations updates.
Read this out, and see if that helps you.
https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/location/strategies.html
Try to mix GPS and Accelerometer
If you detect that GPS stopped working, turn on accelerometer. If GPS is turned on again, calculate distance again with it. This way you can have route with GPS parts and accelerometer ones. The bigger GPS parts, the more accurate data will be
How to get more accuracy by GPS_PROVIDER
Basically if the accuracy of a location isn't acceptable throw it away. The next one will be better.
I have a question regarding my programming approach for android - whether it's efficient or not. Just to give you an idea what I try to accomplish:
There are multiple points of interests on a map. If the user gets nearer to a PIT, a notification about the distance shall appear. There are let's say 3 notifications: At a distance of 1 mile, 0.5 miles and 0.1 mile. When the user is more or less exactly at the PIT, no more notifications are shown. The user is supposed to drive a car or another vehicle.
I'm currently using Geofences to detect whether the user has entered a radius of 1 mile. If so, I check the distance of his current location to the PIT. If it's about 0.5 or 0.1 miles away, a notification is fired. Therefore, I check the current location frequently (right now every 10 seconds). If the user is like at the PIT or rather very close, the Geofence is exited and done.
The code is working fine and this approach is the first thing that came to my mind while reading the Android Developer's tutorials etc. But is there another approach that is MORE EFFICIENT?
Although this is (currently) meeting my needs, I have two major concerns:
It seems to drain the battery quite a lot. Since the user is most likely to be in a car where he can charge his phone during usage, this might be less of a problem.
I read the number of PITs from a file on the SD card. In my example I have just a few PITs. But the user is able to modify the source data so that he can add as many as he wants to. Google says that only 100 active Geofences are supported per user. But what if my user has more than 100 PITs? Since I'm using a Geofence to sense whether I have to fire the first notification or not - this is a severe problem. So is there an alternative?
I have a few suggestions :
1) To lower the amount of gps fixes, you could calculate a sleep time. The idea is to do frequent gps fixes when near a 'border' and few when far away. This could be further enhanced by taking the speed parameter returned by the GPS into account.
If for instance the user is 20 miles from the nearest border while driving 20mph, you can easily wait 30 minutes before turning on the gps again, just to give a simple example.
2) I have run in to the same problem. My solution was simply to select only the POI's within X miles. This way ensuring never to risk hitting the limit of 100. When the user has moved (X-1) miles from his initial position, the geofences are rebuild using the new location.
If you think there is a high risk of having such a high density of points that the above strategy still might fall, I would consider making your own proximity checking entirely based on gps instead of geofences.
I'm writing an app that utilizes parse for cloud data storage. I recently was told that the people I'm writing this for are opening a second location, and would like to know which location a user is checking in to/recording data at. I've found the google code at:
http://developer.android.com/training/location/geofencing.html
that defines how to use geofencing, as well as how to get the last known gps/network location.
http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/location/strategies.html
But I can't tell if either one of these are what I need. Basically I'm trying to do the following:
User starts app
User clicks "Check In" to check in to a class at the gym
When the "check in" activity loads, the user can click a class. At this point in time I'd like to know if the user is say...within 5 miles of a central lat/long. The two locations are around 20 miles apart, so a rough estimate putting them even within a few miles should be fine (are they in Sunnyvale or San Jose?)
When user clicks a class, the check-in gets sent to a Parse database, along with the location (either one city or the other)
I'm not sure if geofencing is proper for this case, as i just need to know rough area from a point..but the basic location getting sample doesn't seem to show how to check when the phone is near a point.
To this point, I've found the following:
http://www.javacodegeeks.com/2011/01/android-proximity-alerts-tutorial.html
This seems to be the best option, except it constantly checks for "distance" from the set point, and I need to tell once if the user is near one or the other locations.
Something like this maybe:
Location me = new Location("");
Location dest = new Location("");
me.setLatitude(myLat);
me.setLongitude(myLong);
dest.setLatitude(destLat);
dest.setLongitude(destLong);
float dist = me.distanceTo(dest);
You can then repeat for the second location and store both distances then compare to see the smallest.
Would it be possible to make an Android application that works based on location, for example when you get to work the app might turn off WiFi or Bluetooth or change any other system settings in order to save battery or something?
The app would require the user to enter in locations where they want the app to begin working, like their address, and when the phone sees that they have arrived at this location it will start working. I want to do this but I don't know where to start.
I already have some android app development experience.
Yes absolutely this is possible. I have worked on approx three application with same concept.
You need to create a center point and define a radius for the same.
Then you need to calculate the distance of you current location with that particular center point and if your distance is less than or equal to radius, trigger to switch on the services you want.
In android you can use
LocationManager class
For collecting the data. If you want some more help I can provide the same too.
I've played around with a concept like this on the Windows Phone for a while, and I think this would work for Android too.
Basically, you'd use the GPS of the device to detect your location, and then compare this to the locations saved by the user. If the location comes within range of a saved setting, perform an action.
GPS usage however drains battery, so you'd have to experiment a bit with making this an efficient method.
Have you tried GeoFencing, its really cool. It lets you define a center point, and a radius. Once the user enters this radius you get callback or a pendingIntent. You can do what you want in your callback.
You can get addresses of your customers and build geofence around their locations.
Edit :
If you choose to not use GeoFenceing (for what ever reason), note that LocationManager is highly buggy and unstable on most mobile phones (Samsung).
Instead use LocationClient, which takes care of all the crap LocationManager leaves with us to deal with and provides location faster, lesser battery and customized accuracy.
Edit :
If anyone tries to convince you otherwise, check this out. A video from google developers and their talk about why LocationManager sucks, and why they knew and helped us figure out the value Sensors add to the entire solution.
Edit : Design of your solution
You need 2 geofences
1) Outer, you can hard code this to a imaginary 500 m from office. From then on you can start looking for wifizones
2) Once a wifizone is found, save the gps and the distance from his address point. That is your inner radius.
1 Geofence is defined by your install, 2nd geofence is defined by your runtime.
2nd Geofence and be used henceforth to disable GPS (only incase you decide to use LocationManager). If not you wont need this, LocationClient will do what it does best.
I have a list of coordinates in the database identified as POI. For a city could be >100 records.
I would like to get notified when the phone gets in 150 meters range of one of the location. The location coordinates too has an error/radius, usually 10 to 100meters. Since I don't find it good to add each location(could be hundreds) for a trigger, how can I optimize the wake-up code?
Also do I have options to remove a previously setup notification from the queue?
You could store your POIs in some sort of intelligent Hash-Table using the coordinates to compute a unique hash. Each time a location update arrives you make a lookup in your hash-table to see if there are POIs near the current location. This lookup should only take O(1), since it is a hash-lookup.
The desired range should be taken into account when computing the hashes and storing the POIs.
Just an idea!
Kind regards,
mefiX
There's an app named Locale, that can toggle various events based on your GPS location OR available Wifi network OR cell-station id, etc
It also has a plugins interface. It could be useful for you to examine that app and, maybe, write a plugin for it.
This problem reminds me of graphics in video games. There's no need to load the points that are well outside your range of movement. I'd break down the map into a grid, set triggers for the 8 adjecent grid blocks and then for each of the POI within the current grid block. When a new grid block is reached the triggers are updated. It'd probably be smart to overlap the grid blocks considering the range of error.