Convoyage

No one travels alone. Shared spatial awareness for airport passenger assistance, built on SGA-AR and ZaiNar.

Inspiration

This started at home. Our grandparents flew between India and the Gulf for years, requesting wheelchair assistance that often never really showed up parked at gates, handed between strangers, nobody accountable for the gap in between. One of our aunts requests wheelchair service every time she flies, and every trip starts with the same quiet question: will anyone actually come this time? And one of our moms gets genuinely paranoid whenever her parents are in an airport, she can track their plane to the second, but she cannot see her parents at all.

What it does

Convoyage gives ground-handling teams one shared, live map of the terminal, built on two technologies doing what each does best:

• SGA-AR draws the map - the terminal, captured once, as the shared visual layer everyone sees.
• ZaiNar keeps it true - every attendant wears a badge the size of an ID card, every wheelchair carries a tag, tracked to sub-meter precision, through walls, always on. No headset required to be on the map, and the map stays accurate at jet bridges, doors, and elevators — exactly where camera-only systems go blind. When a gate changes, a coordinator drags the closest free attendant on the map and the route reaches them instantly.

On top of that map sits the product nobody in this industry offers: the Passenger's Window. The system already knows which attendant is with which passenger and whether they're on time, so the family member who booked the ticket gets a live view on their own phone. "Your mother is with attendant Maria. Heading to Gate A4. Handoff confirmed." Nothing to wear, nothing to install. The passenger wears nothing; staff wear a badge, not a headset.

How we built it

For this demo, we focused on the two surfaces that carry the whole pitch: the Coordinator Map, showing live attendant and passenger positions with a click-to-reassign flow for gate changes, and the Passenger's Window, a phone-styled live tracking view with a timestamped activity feed. Both views are driven by deterministic, hardcoded scenarios.

Challenges we ran into

Scoping was the hardest part. Convoyage sits on real infrastructure (ZaiNar's positioning network, SGA-AR's spatial mapping) that we don't have access to build in an ideathon timeframe, so the challenge was designing a demo that makes the system's logic legible without pretending to be a working RF deployment. We also had to think carefully about the two very different stakeholders on either end of the same map: a coordinator who needs operational density and control, and a worried family member who needs exactly one reassuring sentence.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We think the Passenger's Window is the right product to invent on top of someone else's infrastructure — it's a small, safe slice of the map, but it's the piece that turns an invisible cost center into the most visible act of care an airline can offer the person who decides which airline grandma flies next. We're also proud of grounding this in something researched, not hypothetical: a real $50M DOT fine, a real named wheelchair contractor, a real federal 30-minute rule.

What we learned

The clearest ideas usually come from watching a system fail someone you love, not from a market gap analysis. We also relearned a basic product lesson: the feature that wins a room isn't always the most technically ambitious one, it's the one that answers a question someone was already quietly asking.

What's next for Convoyage

Version one: wheelchair assists, one concourse, one Prospect-served hub, judged on a single number - dropped handoffs per thousand assists, before and after. From there: guided assists for blind and elderly passengers, unaccompanied minors, and paid concierge service on the same map, and eventually turnaround and terminal-wide ops awareness that matches attendants to passenger needs, not just proximity.

The airport has always known where its planes are, down to the second. Convoyage lets it finally see its people. Because no one should travel alone.

Built With

• accessibility
• airport
• senior