Ruta | Devpost

Inspiration

The inspiration behind Ruta came from the challenge of coordinating the fastest routes between numerous destinations. These instances include: having to run errands and not knowing where to start, coordinating ride-shares for people from unfamiliar locations, or discovering a new city with only a rough list of popular attractions. We thought it would be helpful to have a platform that could assist with visually understanding the best path.

What it does:

Our website provides a mapped itinerary of the fastest route, with an estimate travel time. Users can input their ideal departure time for a more accurate calculation of their travel time.

How we built it:

We designed the logos and web UI, then used google maps API to map and display the routes.

Challenges we ran into:

The first challenge we tackled was determining what algorithm to use when finding the fastest route between two points but also travel through all other points. This is a variation of the traveling salesman problem (TSP), however, now with a determined start and end point. Another challenge we faced was interfacing with google maps API. We used React for our website, however, documentation for the google-maps-react wrapper was sparse. Other challenges we faced were implementing a dynamic controlled form in React as well as a non-standard font.

Accomplishments that we're proud of:

We determined a high-level modification to solutions for the traveling salesman problem, implemented a dynamic controlled form in React, used a non-standard font, and came up with some workarounds to compensate for the lack of documentation of the google-maps-react wrapper.

What we learned:

We learned how to interface with the google maps API and React, how to implement a dynamic controlled form in React, and how to apply TSP to a real-world setting.

What's next for Ruta:

Next steps for Ruta are implementing a better algorithm for solving our variation of TSP, as well as finding a better way to interface google maps API with React.