After many months of delay, the project aimed at tracking the location of the Red Hawk shuttles has made significant progress, and will continue to do so over the next few weeks, according to plans.
The idea for the tracking system was begun by former Grand Marshal Max Yates ’06, and has now been headed by August Fietkau ’08 of the Senate Facilities, Finance, and Advancement Committee for the past semester. The Senate is working with a team of undergraduate students who have taken over the research and development of the more technical aspects for the project.
The two groups, with the financial support of the Board of Trustees and the Administration Division, are making strides in the tracking system which they hope to have up and running by the Spring 2007 semester. According to Dan Horvath ’08, co-chair for the Facilities, Finance, and Advancement Committee, there is a $5,000 commitment from Vice President for Administration Claude Rounds, and $2,000 from the Board of Trustees that is being put into the project.
The team of students who are working on the project consists of Jonathan Bidwell ’07 and Lam Tran ’07 as an independent study program for a three-credit free elective under faculty advisor Jeff Miner. Brian Keating ’10 is also contributing to the team by setting up the maps of campus using MapInfo.
Bidwell said that the tracking system would determine the latitude and longitude of a Red Hawk shuttle through a cell phone network and also make use of tracking technologies from iTrack. The coordinates would then be moved from the server onto a web-accessible map. The website will be on its own server run by the Division of the Chief Information Officer, according to Bidwell.
The initial goal is to provide the service to benefit students, but there is a dual motive. “The additional information we’d like is to start to maintain numbers of riders and vehicle statistics that could help the parking department manage their fleet,” said Mary Alice O’Brien, business support manager for Integrated Administrative Computing Services and facilitator of the shuttle tracking project. In addition, the team hopes to be able to determine the number of available seats on the bus with laser trip counters.
According to Bidwell, the team has taken a middle-of-the-road hybrid solution for the project, neither entirely running the project internally—which would be much more inexpensive but not necessarily the most effective—nor completely through a private company, which would be far beyond Rensselaer’s price range. The option chosen will require approximately $5,000 in start-up costs.
The team is now putting up the maps that allow students to see more detailed parts of the RPI campus, such as the Union Horseshoe. The team of undergraduates is hopeful to have a beta map up by the end of this semester.
“It should be a great service for students to judge long waiting periods and whether to run as fast as you can to class or wait for the shuttle—otherwise a tricky gamble,” said Bidwell.
All the undergraduate students involved in the project felt it was a great experience. Tran observed, “It was good to see so many disciplines work together: the arts, computer science, and computer systems.”
Bidwell added, “The disciplines cross over so often with different stages of the project, so it was good to work with such a diverse team with different strengths and weaknesses.”
