Pathfinder

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  Route Page

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  Map page

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  Inventory Page

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  Home Screen

Inspiration

Due to the pandemic grocery stores have become extremely unsafe and its best to order things online. However, not everyone can afford such luxuries. The Pathfinder project is for the people that need to risk their lives to get supplies for survival.

What it does

An application that lets you fill your cart in like you would on Amazon and then it would find the shortest path from the entrance, to all your items, to the exit. This would minimize the time spent in the store thus decreasing the risk of infection.

How I built it

Currently this program uses CGI to produce HTML pages to interact with a GUI. I chose this approach as C++ is my strong suit and I learned CGI GUIs at Ohlone College. I started off by writing a brute force algorithm that returns the shortest path after evaluating all routes. I then optimized it so that once the path being pursued exceeds the shortest path to the item, the path is abandoned. This greatly improved the efficiency of the code.

Challenges I ran into

A lot of stack overflows and infinite loops.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Actually created a Pathfinding Algorithm that works efficiently.

What I learned

How to make and optimize a pathfinding algorithm

What's next for Pathfinder

I will keep working on this Project as I see its potential. I hope to make the following changes:

Write a backend using NodeJS. Completely rework the UI using React. Rewrite the algorithm so that it uses loops instead of recursion in order to avoid stack overflow errors. Get a more realistic map or partner with a store like walmart. Refine the product and scale so that it can help millions of people

Built With

• c++