Solaride

Team Intro Slide

Inspiration

We are four seniors who currently live off campus and study engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. The commute from off campus housing to the engineering quad is between 20-25 minutes depending on where you live. In an effort to reduce these commute times, our team has come up with the idea of building a scooter network on UPenn's campus. The scooter network will function by installing solar panel powered stations in high traffic areas to maximize usage and charge the scooters. UPenn students will have to log into a mobile application with their pennkey and password to view station zones and unlock scooters.

What it does

Minimized commute times for the Penn community. Maximizes productivity.

How we built it

Mobile application: React Native - JavaScript, CSS Scooter Network: Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Scooter Implementation: Barcode scanner; GPS receiver Solar Panel Station: Solar panel, station hardware, and more TBD items

Challenges we ran into

TBD...

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Have implemented a mobile application that renders a map and shows coordinate location as inputted into the database.

What we learned

TBD...

What's next for Solaride

Map out network by understanding student volume at off campus locations Create heat map of network to determine station locations Finalize mobile app by implementing barcode scanner and receiving GPS transmitter signal to locate scooters Implement lock on scooter Build station

1 Minute Video Link

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HLvvbrDWOc

Demo Video Link (2 minutes)

https://youtu.be/k693fEHdSJI

Abstract

Penn students have limited options when it comes to transportation within campus. They have little knowledge of Penn transit options, ride-sharing options are too expensive, and bike-sharing stations are not placed optimally throughout campus. Most students therefore only have the option to walk around campus, which can take them up to 20 minutes depending where they live off campus and where their classes are. Leveraging this information, our team decided that the best goal for our project would be to provide a convenient, cost-friendly, and sustainable alternative for Penn student body to use as means of transportation. Our project, Solaride, is a network of electric, solar panel charged scooters. Scooter sharing companies such as Lime and Bird have been making a rise in some major cities such as DC and San Francisco. We believe that this is the solution that Penn needs in order to provide the student body with the ideal option for getting from class to class. We are taking a two-part approach to this project. The first part is the network analysis, where we’re analyzing data on Penn student body such as amount of people, where they live off-campus, and where they have to travel to get to class. With this information, we are making a Travel Demand Model to analyze the optimal locations to place our stations and evaluate the number of scooter we would need to satisfy demand. Parallelly, we are working on developing a user-friendly app that allows users to log in with their Penn information, find stations and scooters, and unlock the scooters for use. The second part of the project is the hardware component of the scooter and the stations. We are working with Arduino and GPS in order to be able to constantly track the locations of the scooter and integrate it into the information provided into the app. Additionally, we believe our scooters should be a sustainable and eco friendly option, therefore it is important to find a way to charge our scooters through solar panels. We are working on finding the best way to use solar panels on the scooter stations so that they can absorb the amount of charge needed to fully charge all the scooters in our network. We hope that our project will provide a holistic and multi-sided approach to solving the transportation issues for students by providing this convenient and innovative solution for Penn.