A few months back I made a prototype application for Swarco Technology the Bike Timer application. This prototype proved to be interesting to Swarco Techonlogy and they wanted to build a fully functional application. As I was at the last two semesters of my master in Software Engineering I had to start working on my master thesis. This project seemed like a great opportunity! So a collaboration was estasblished between Swarco Techonlogy, a fellow student, Thomas Lemqvist, and I. 

A full documentation of this collaboration can be see in our master thesis report. A demonstration video of the application is shown below and exaplained in Danish (Sorry about that, non Danish-speaker).

The above image shows the Android application that was built throughout the project. Imagine yourself driving in a car towards an intersection unbeknownst of when the traffic signal will turn green. All you see is a red signal which you are eagerly expecting to turn green so you can pass the intersection.

But what if you knew exactly when the signal would turn green? Then you would be able to perfectly time your speed according to the expected signal turn and avoid stopping at the intersection because you drove too fast!

This is what the projection in the application tries to represent. The white line in front of the car being the intersection and the car being yourself. The red area then represents the time in which the signal is red. The goal is then to try and keep your car within the green area. Now imagine everything moving in real-time…. Okay… I think that may be hard to imagine – watch the video below to get an even better picture of what the application is!

The above video shows both a simulation and a real drive in Odense, Denmark using the product of the master thesis project. It is seen how an application is able to stream real-time data between an Android device and intersections out on the street. This allows our application to present an optimized speed recommendation (GLOSA) for drivers, which helps drivers avoid unneccessary stops.

The visualization seen in the Android application was made possible using the Unity game engine. A Unity player was embedded inside an Android application which allowed us to build an application which fully looked and felt like a regular native Android application – all meanwhile a 3d game engine was running inside an Android fragment. 

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Introduction

This blog post documents the development of the iOS application Steam Mate developed by Simon H. Larsen and Anders Bundgaard for the Autumn 2018 class in iOS programming at SDU. The purpose of the application is to connect players of games on the Steam platform with each other based on distance and preferences. Steam Mate aims to aid players in finding new people to play their favourite games with and enable more cooperative play. The application draws inspiration from Tinder, a very popular dating app for Android and iOS, in which opportunities to communicate are granted based on mutual interest.

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The solution for avoiding red lights. With the Bike Timer app you will be able to see when the light signal turn red and green. The app will calculate the speed you need to keep in order to pass the signal without stopping for a red light. The application was developed using Angular 4 in Typescript. It connects to an ITC traffic controller by Swarco Technology using a websocket.
The gif underneath shows the app in action.

The speedometer shows the current speed the cyclist is going. The green bar on top of the speedometer is the speed recommendation. The right-hand side of the speed recommendation is the maximum speed you can go to pass the signal and the left-hand side is the minimum speed you must go to pass the signal. When the signal is green, then the maximum speed recommendation is rather unimportant, however, the minimum speed is very important. This is because no matter what you will pass the signal if you’re simply going very fast, but you will not pass the signal if you’re moving too slow. This is where the speed recommendation gets handy. By following the speed recommendation somewhere around minimum, you will pass the green light without worrying about a red light when you get to the crossroads.

 
The bike timer was demoed at Intertraffic Amsterdam. The setup included a bike, an Android phone and a phone holder. The application was integrating with an actual traffic controller – Swarco Technology’s ITC mini – which enabled the application to give speed recommendation based on an actual traffic signal.