Automatic Vehicle Location (AVL)
Cost vs usability of off the shelf Automatic Vehicle Location (AVL), or tracking systems has become an identified problem, especially when being considered for use by small organizations.
A typical vehicle embedded system for tracking, would cost in the neighborhood of $1000 to $1500 including installation. Add on to that the need for a data connection and the required wireless connection fee, and the costs increase dramatically. Additionally, a visualizer for the captured GPS data will also be needed in some form. With an embedded system, the options for reuse of the hardware such as the GPS and data connectivity are few or even nonexistent.
Utilizing off the shelf hardware and open source software tools, SharedGeo is participating via an OPERA grant on a research project to build a reusable AVL tracking system that can be run on any Linux based OS with an integrated or attached GPS. The end product will be a downloadable package that can be used in the field in a standalone manner, complete with it’s own local set of maps. These maps can will be easily added to with locally available data. This will be possible because of the open source nature of the development tools, which allow for quick and easy configuration changes that will allow the end users to add their own data to the base mapping system.
If desired this type of GPS tool can also be used with a Server component to capture the GPS locations for tracking and/or republication of the GPS tracks to other end users.
For more information, see here.
