FirstRoute

Inspiration

As cities grow more connected, a true smart city is one where technology actively protects lives. Our inspiration came from recognizing how even small delays or congested traffic can significantly impact first responders response times. In dense urban areas like Chicago or New York City, congestion and limited driver awareness often slow down emergency services during critical, life and death moments. Our goal was to design a system that uses smart infrastructure to prioritize emergency vehicles to reduce risk and create a safer urban environment.

What it does

FirstRoute allows emergency vehicles to communicate directly with city infrastructure as well as navigation apps in drivers phones or smart cars. When activated, the system dynamically adjusts traffic lights to create a green-light wave along the response route, as well as sending real-time alerts to nearby drivers through mobile notifications and connected vehicle systems instructing them to move over or reroute. This will reduce response times, collisions caused by emergency service vehicles, and overall improve how first responders navigate in urban areas.

Challenges we ran into

Github kept deleting everything. Getting the city simulation to have cars that follow the rules of the road using navMesh in unity.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we have submitted something to this hackathon.

What we learned

We learned how to successfully work as a team using github, as well as how to manage the workload in order to have a working simulation of our project. For some of us, it was our first time using Unity and we learned how to manage the different assets and objects that Unity provides.

What's next for FirstRotue?

If development of this project was continued, we would expand the simulation to include larger city maps, real traffic data inputs, and more advanced AI behavior. We would also explore integrating real-world IoT hardware or traffic APIs to move beyond simulation. Developing FirstRoute into real world hardware could help save lives and would require more real-world testing in the future.

Built With

• c#
• unity