This week I spent some time setting up a basic communication protocol with Colin for the interim demo. We were able to get good feedback from the instructors about what issues need to be solved, which I’ll talk about at the end. I also continued working on the response request for the backend. particularly retuning a string to indicate how far the user has left till the next action (ie. turn). If the next action is <5m away, I instruct them to prepare to do the next action. Once their distance from the previous checkpoint is >5m, and their distance to the next checkpoint is decreasing, I increment my cache index, indicating that the user is on the next portion of the trip.
A critical piece of feedback we got this week was, how do we know which of the street we’re on, and if there is a crosswalk when we turn? I have been doing reading on the HERE API to address this problem, but have not been able to see a feasible solution so far, as most features on the API, such as this, are focused on car routing instead of pedestrian routing. Another alternative I’ve been considering is reviewing other APIs, such as Google Maps, to see if they potentially have functionality that can solve this issue. In the worst case, if we are unable to solve this, the most brute force way to solve this issue is to assume that on any checkpoint, the user may have to cross a crosswalk. That is, we would tell the user that they may have to cross an intersection, and to use their walking cane/other senses to determine if they actually need to.