GPS Insight | GPS Fleet Tracking Blog

Jul 26 2009

Driver-to-Vehicle Mapping is here! — Assign drivers (historically) to vehicles, and report on drivers, not just vehicles

Category: Driver Assignment to Vehicles,Ease of use,Extreme Return on Investment,GPS Tracking,New Features,Reports — rdonat @ 4:37 pm

(Click here for a video demo of Driver-to-Vehicle mapping)

Since many customers have drivers which use different vehicles, we have added DRIVERS to GPS Insight in addition to VEHICLES. This has the following benefits:

Driver-centric reports (e.g. idling/speeding/odd-hours by driver, not by vehicle)
Administrative control of which drivers are assigned to which vehicles
Historical accountability for which vehicle was driven by which driver (e.g. for parking tickets, toll violations)

Vehicles may be assigned to drivers, and drivers may be assigned to vehicles. A driver may be assigned to multiple vehicles at one time, but a vehicle can only be assigned to one driver at a time.

In other words, if John drives car1 and truck2, and no one else ever does, he can be assigned to both. However, if Sally moves from car2 to car1, John must be unassigned from car1 before Sally can be assigned. This way, if someone drives a couple vehicles exclusively, they don’t need to be re-mapped every time they start driving a different vehicle.

Any activity performed by that vehicle during the time that driver was assigned will be associated with that driver for reporting purposes. Maps will have driver information available, and alerts/messages will have the appropriate driver’s contact information as an override to the default vehicle information (e.g. email address & cell phone number for SMS).
A driver may be assigned to a vehicle in 5 different ways:

Manual assignment via the web interface
Touching a driver keyfob to a reader in the vehicle (if installed)
Sending the driver id via Garmin
SMS text message gps 1234 assign david.smith assigns david smith to truck 1234 at that time)
API (Application Programming Interface)

Here is the workflow for assigning a new driver to a vehicle. Bear in mind that the times you can choose to assign a vehicle include now or the beginning of any vehicle trip (e.g. when that driver first started driving the vehicle). The times you can choose to unassign a driver from a vehicle include now or any begin or end of trip. These options are conveniently shown in a pick list for you to choose from, as shown in the screen shots below:

First, open the Driver Administration tool:

Click on Create New: Driver:

Then complete the form for a new driver:

Note that you can then select a vehicle to assign the driver to here, as well as create/modify a driver group (e.g. parts drivers, supervisors, etc.):

Adding a Supervisors group with 3 members:

Alternatively, you can create a driver association when looking at all vehicles under the Vehicles tab (at top):

Choose an existing driver or create a new one on the fly:

Then choose a start time for the driver-to-vehicle association (always, current date, or from a particular date/trip):

And either allow them to stay assigned or end their assignment at a particular vehicle stop time in the past:

Now that the driver is assigned (shown below), this association will be evident in relevant maps, reports, and alerts:

Driver-centric reports, mapping, and alert functionality will be added continually to the GPS Insight product to make use of this driver-to-vehicle mapping capability.
Here is an example for a day where 4 different drivers used our company car (Scion):

Trent drives to work
Elliot drives to a customer site with a salesperson (Jason)
Elliot drives to his house to pick up his vehicle
Jason drives back to work
Trent takes the Scion home

We have entered the appropriate mappings and here are some screens/reports which show these mappings:

Here is an idle report (which conveniently breaks out idling/stops/mileage/etc. by driver, by day:

The driver activity is shown (in order) on the Activity Detail report:

Historical mapping has the driver information as well:

More driver-specific functionality and capabilities will be added to GPS Insight within the next few weeks and months, and we welcome customer input and requests.

For more information on this new feature please feel free to call us at 866-477-4321, option 2 (for support).

Rob

(Click here for a video demo of Driver-to-Vehicle mapping)

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Jul 17 2009

Wicked hot in Phoenix — finding your car fast with GPS Insight and the iPhone

Category: Arizona,cell phone capabilities,GPS Insight Employees,GPS Tracking,Mapping,Miscellaneous — rdonat @ 1:29 pm

I took my kids and wife to see Wicked (the musical) last weekend at Arizona State.

It was hot. 118 degrees hot.

The play was good, but my kids wanted to walk over this bridge to leave afterward, which left me confused on where I had parked my car. The heat was melting my brain.

So I pulled up the vehicle location on my iPhone using our Mobile Map application:

The blue dot is my iPhone & it told me that my car was East of me. That’s all I needed to know, but didn’t necessarily know what direction was East (Gammage is a big round spaceship looking building so direction is not immediately apparent).

The new iPhone has a compass built in — perfect. I wish I had this when I was in the Army:

So I head East & see my car and note that it’s in the 6th space:

Looking at the iPhone in satellite view & zooming in, we show I’m in the 5th space, as well as where I am when I pull this up out of curiosity:

So then we get going & even after 10 minutes of driving, it still shows as 118 degrees. Note that the AC & the seat coolers are cranked as high as they can go…

We were in a hurry since the play was really long and our babysitter needed to leave at 5. Unfortunately at one point I saw we were in Mesa and I realized I missed my turn, costing me 7.42 miles while I drove the wrong direction.

I was a little preoccupied trying not to burn myself on the steering wheel, etc. to notice I had passed up the 101.

Apart from it being insanely hot, and my missing my turn to get home to the babysitter on time, it was a great day — This is my second time seeing Wicked & it’s a fantastic play (The Wizard of Oz from the Wicked Witch’s perspective).

My 7 year old son Ryan had this to say: Wizard of Oz – 1 star. Wicked – 4 stars. He’s hard to please but Wicked worked better than a 70 year old movie apparently.

Rob.

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Jun 14 2009

Camelback Mountain hike helped by GPS Insight

Category: Arizona,cell phone capabilities,EZ-1000,Garmin Integration,Google Earth,GPS Insight Employees,GPS Navigation,GPS Tracking,Landmarks — rdonat @ 9:32 pm

I decided to hike Camelback Mountain today — I’ll try to make this short (shorter than the 1 1/2 hour hike up & down the toughest mountain I’ve done in the Valley).

I couldn’t remember where to go so I looked it up on the internet & then dispatched myself via my Garmin from my PC:

Then I created a landmark as well, while I was at it (note I put the “route me here” address where it should go, but then I outlined the whole mountain) :

Then I routed myself there with my Garmin by wirelessly dispatching my vehicle’s Garmin to that location:

Turns out it was the wrong entrance — I go to the other one typically, so I drove around aimlessly finding that, plus the REI sports place where I bought a new water backpack (called a Camelbak, coincidentally…) .

Running an efficiency report, I ran 58% more time and 20% more miles (since the miles I went extra were on surface streets, not highways, this makes sense):

Here is my driving around aimlessly, wasting time & fuel (green dots, vs. blue “optimal path”):

Then I get to Camelback, and send a couple SMS notes when I start, get to the top, then get back to the bottom:

Here is my track of the 1 1/2 hour climb to the top and back (using an EZ-1000 at 10 second updates):

Here is an iPhone picture of me at the top, mapping both my iPhone GPS location (blue) and the EZ-1000 location (red pin):

But here is the good part:

Toward the bottom:

And at the top:

I’m a little sore after the 1 1/2 hour long trek up & back down, but the view is worth it.

And I even wore a GPS Insight hat…

Rob.

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Jun 13 2009

Tracking our new TV from Denver to my living room…

Category: Conferences,EZ-1000,Google Earth,GPS Insight Employees,GPS Tracking,Package Tracking — rdonat @ 1:36 pm

We just exhibited at GFX (Government Fleet Expo), organized by Eric Bearly at Bobit, which was a great show with 500 attendees.

Whenever we go to a show, we have a big 52″ LCD at our booth. To rent a cheap 50″ which has poor resolution typically would cost us $950, which is nuts. So I usually buy a new one at Best Buy for less than double that instead and store it in the closest office/friendly person’s home for use in the next local conference where we exhibit.

Well, my TV just went out at home, so guess what? I get this one.

But shipping them is a nightmare, since they sit on a dock & stand a pretty good chance of getting stolen.

So I stuck a GPS tracking device, an EZ-1000 in it (someone called the device Telemundo, Spanish for TV, I guess…)

When I was at the Airport, I was able to confirm that they picked it up using my iPhone like this:

(Here is how to take a screen shot with an Iphone — hold down the round application button & press the top power button.)

So I knew it made it off the dock and to a transfer dock to be shipped to my office (and then my living room…).

I was surprised to see they flew it, and our 900 lb trade show booth from Denver to Salt Lake City, then to LA. Hopefully we’ll see the TV on Monday, and then I can watch TV again.

Here are a few more screen shots of how I was able to track the TV on the way from the trade-show:

I clicked on Get Directions to see how far it was, thinking they were driving it (but it’s being flown apparently):

Note that it’s at LAX Airport right now.

While it’s in the air, we don’t receive GPS or transmit location, since the plane blocks the GPS signal, but this is pretty good for determining roughly where a TV is. We are working on a different product which is better for determining an asset’s location, even if it’s well inside a truck/structure. But for now, we stick to vehicle, and the occasional TV headed for Rob’s living room, and this does the trick. If it had wound up in a dockworker’s home, we would have been able to send police pretty easily.

We only sell EZ-1000′s for business use, such as for security patrols/bike police, etc., but those security-oriented customers occasionally use them to track things like this, & I’m glad we have this capability ourselves. We also use them as easy demo units, so if you want a very quick proof of concept, charge one up, stick it in a vehicle or two’s drink-holder, & you’ve got a tracking proof of concept without having to do an install (which still is only typically 15 minutes or so).

Rob.

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May 14 2009

NAFA 2009 in New Orleans

Category: EZ-1000,Garmin Integration,GPS Insight Employees,GPS Tracking,GPS Tracking Industry,Miscellaneous,New Features — rdonat @ 12:32 pm

At NAFA 2009 (National Association of Fleet Administrators), we unveiled several new hardware and software offerings. Notably:

Garmin Integration
Driver Log/DOT Hours of Service application coming in 2009
EZ-1000 & PNP-1500 hardware
Switches & Sensors capabilities

This year’s conference was in New Orleans. Here are some pics of our booth and

The 5 of us who attended (Ryan, Jolene, Rob, Alissa, & Elliot) (wearing our Bourbon Street beads…)

Then Elliot donned a Mardi Gras outfit & joined in the parade…

We had a good time & the show went well.

Here is a video interview of me which Automotive Digest published after the show.

Rob.

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Mar 14 2009

GPS Insight helps get Ryan to his friend’s birthday party…

Category: Google Earth,GPS Insight Employees,GPS Navigation,GPS Tracking,Package Tracking — rdonat @ 1:47 pm

Cast:

Lost Driver: Rob’s beautiful wife Kristi

Dispatch: Rob at his desk on a beautiful Saturday afternoon

Important Delivery: birthday present

Happy Customer: Birthday boy

Pretend this is a business scenario — this happens hundreds of times a day with our product for our customers.

My 6 year old is heading to a birthday party with my wife driving. The address is new and doesn’t show up on her navigation built into the car.

I’m at work & she called and asked me for directions.

Since I’m sitting at my desk, and we usually have our account pulled up, it took me about 15 seconds to tell her how to get there.

Just type in the address in Google Earth (this works on our browser map as well, I just happen to like Google Earth more).

Right click it and choose “Get Directions To.” Then either click or right click her car and choose “Get Directions From.”:

So then the directions come up:

And I explain to her how to wind over to the new street address (clearly a new subdivision since the aerial photo shows it as dirt)

Then I watch as she takes a wrong turn anyway… (It’s not like I follow directions well either). I’m able to call her & explain she needed to take a left, not a right.

Then she’s back on track, and gets to the address.

But then she stops there for 4 minutes, & moves somewhere else?

Why? I’m guessing the party is at the subdivision clubhouse. Turn on Street Maps, & confirm that’s the case:

Or maybe they’re having it in the park, who knows? I’ll find out later. Meanwhile I am getting caught up at work on a Saturday. It only took 30 seconds to find and get directions to my wife, & another 30 to call her back & help in the maze of this new area. Unfortunately it takes me longer than that to document this good example for the blog, but it’s done now, & I’m only 40 minutes farther away from getting out of the office on this beautiful day in Scottsdale. I wish I had taken Ryan to the party instead!

This should illustrate the real time dispatch assistance you can give using GPS Insight though — call our sales or support for more info at 866-GPS-4321.

Rob.

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Mar 03 2009

Inaugural run with EZ-1000

Category: Ad Hoc Reports,Arizona,CUSTOM APPLICATIONS OF GPS INSIGHT,EZ-1000,Google Earth,GPS Insight Employees,GPS Tracking,Mapping,Miscellaneous,Reporting — rdonat @ 12:17 am

We are testing out this new tracking device which I mentioned in the past couple articles.

I am trying to lose a few pounds gained from the past 2 trade shows in Dallas (mmm, barbeque…).

So I went on a run today and put the tiny device in my right shorts pocket and headed on my usual route.

Here is the 2 minute-by-2 minute track:

As always with GPS Insight, green means moving, blue means idling (e.g. 0 mph as I start/end the run), and the color and thickness of the line goes from “light and thin” to “dark and thick” to help indicate direction of travel which helps visually determine the vehicle’s (or runner’s) activity more easily.

Here is a different perspective which shows me leaving my subdivision and heading EAST 2 miles then turning around at the main road. Note that the light blue line is much closer to the sidewalk than the line coming back (about 100 feet off). I took the same sidewalk the whole way — what happened? This is where battery life vs. 100% accuracy comes in. 100% accuracy, we are good for 10-12 hours on a charge. But we can go well over 3 days on a charge at 2 minute updates if the GPS unit is allowed to sleep between those two minutes — this generally adds some error to the location, in this case up to 100 feet when I’m not faced toward the satellites.

Well, as I mentioned, I put this tiny tracker in my right pocket and headed East. When I headed back, my body was “in the way” of the GPS signal from the predominant GPS satellites in this area at this time, in the Southern sky. This means they caught a bit of a bounced signal from the houses, trees, etc. to my right. This subtle difference shows up on the map. The accuracy of these units is very good (best case, 5 feet, worst case, 100 feet), considering the GPS satellites are 22,370 miles in space, and the tiny device is in my running shorts pocket (don’t worry, we won’t sell this one, and they are VERY waterproof, fyi…). The moral of the story is they’re highly accurate if you only need them for 10-12 hours on a charge, and pretty accurate if you want 3 days (at two minute updates). If you want less frequent updates, they’ll run up to 10-15 days on a single charge.

Our more powerful vehicle-mounted GPS tracking devices are always within 5-15 feet while driving, and typically within 10-30 feet of accuracy when parked. Either way, that is VERY good considering the standard accuracy of a single GPS fix is 9 meters in any direction. This is because only the US Military gets the “100% accurate” signals — for the rest of us it’s only guaranteed within 27′. However, the more samples you take in a given period of time, the more accurate you can become by eliminating the really far off samples. This is a topic for another day. Thankfully, our customers aren’t harvesting grain or painting road lines based on our “civilian” GPS. We don’t cost nearly as much either (trust me).

So to use Google Earth to its fullest, I outlined the path I ran and measured it to be 4.59 miles (I’m getting tired as we speak…):

[Nice mini-racecar track my neighbor has, huh? Unfortunately I don't know him...]

I can run a quick activity detail report for my rough speed while running (along with a “12 MPH” which is bad — it’s due to my going into the house & losing GPS signal which can cause a transient issue with this unit (currently, we are programming it to be less likely once we sell them).

Anyway, that’s some of what you can do with our new small, rechargable EZ-1000. (shown below):

By the way, did I mention it was 85 degrees today here in Scottsdale…? A little hot for a run already (sorry everyone back in the Northeast & Chicago)

Thanks,
Rob.

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Mar 02 2009

Zoo trip tracking with the new EZ-1000

Category: Ad Hoc Reports,Arizona,CUSTOM APPLICATIONS OF GPS INSIGHT,EZ-1000,Google Earth,GPS Insight Employees,GPS Tracking,Landmarks,Miscellaneous,Reporting — rdonat @ 2:10 pm

We haven’t started officially selling the GPSI-1000 yet, but I decided to test it today on a trip to the Phoenix Zoo with my family.

The GPSI-1000 is a tiny GPS tracking device which is battery operated and can be worn on a belt by security personnel, and other generally “outdoors” workers whose safety or productivity needs to be tracked by management.

It is TINY — only 1.4 inches wide by 2.5 inches long:

I wore it on my belt under my shirt all day & tracked my whereabouts every 2 minutes.

It isn’t something we recommend for tracking vehicles — our GO-3000, GPSI-4000, and LD/HD-3500 are the best for that.

But if you want to track your employees when they are OUTSIDE of the vehicle, it’s a great way to go. It will be available later in March.

At 2 minute update rates, it’s enough to know where a person has gone, and it has enough battery to last at least a day between charges.

Additionally, there is a single button which will allow us to implement either a panic alarm or a “mark my location” capability.

Here is a map of both my tracked vehicle (Navigator, the red lines) as well as the GPSI-1000 (worn while I drove, in blue):

The GPSI-4000 in my Navigator is fantastic at tracking the vehicle with fantastic accuracy. The GPSI-1000 (person tracker, really) does a good job but is only 2 minute updates, and occasionally loses track since its internal antenna is inside of the vehicle where it doesn’t get sufficient GPS signal. That’s not its job though.

When I get out of the vehicle, then it shows where we went, every 2 minutes. I won’t bore you with details of how much time we spent looking at giraffes, zebras, amphibians, etc. But I could — all we would need to do is overlay a map of the zoo, put up some geofences to match, and run a landmark report.

Instead, I can illustrate a little of that. Bear in mind that our typical GPSI-1000 “tracked individual” might be a security guard, a dock worker, a temporary worker who doesn’t need a wired GPS device in his or her car, etc.

But I can show you how accurate and useful this hardware can be, especially when combined with a vehicle tracking device:

Basically, once the driver “dismounts” the vehicle and does a patrol, some mowing of yards, movement of equipment, etc., you can still track that individual.

And if you want to know when and for how long they rode the Merry Go Round, you can use our typical GPS Insight capabilities:

Create a polygon around the satellite image of the Carousel (giving it a few more feet to make sure we catch the activity around it):

Then cut/paste into GPS Insight:

Then Paste into “Quick Import” under the Mapping: Landmarks menu:

After quickly refreshing the menu so that the new landmark shows up, run a landmark report:

.07 seconds later:

And here is the accuracy of the units while I was on the Carousel with my 3 kids and wife:

And here were the kids on the Carousel, oldest to youngest:

And on the way there with my family, I kept it under 68 (in a 65 MPH) on the trip there & back — the accuracy between both units is very good in terms of location, speed, and time — here are 2 points right next to each other & only 1 mph off [I called this unit the "Pants Patrol" since I was going to wear it on my belt, in case you were wondering...]:

These units should be available late March for $350 (with applicable $25 quantity discounts at 10, 25, 50, 100, 250 levels). Monthlies will range from $15-40 depending on update frequency (on 1 per hour/on demand to 1 minute). We should have a heavy equipment version of this unit available in April as well.

Thanks,

Rob.

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Jan 16 2009

Ski maps are really inaccurate (part 3 of the ski overlay series)

Category: Arizona,California,CUSTOM APPLICATIONS OF GPS INSIGHT,Google Earth,GPS Insight Employees,GPS Tracking,Mapping,Overlays,Package Tracking,Skiing — rdonat @ 11:49 pm

This is the 3rd (and last) in a series on GPS tracking of skiers, and more to the point, the overlaying of ski maps into Google Earth in order to put that data into reference. So after asking someone way better at Photoshop than me to “stretch” that ski trail map of Heavenly Lake Tahoe and make it fit Google Earth, it has become VERY clear that those maps aren’t even close to accurate.

Photoshopping the map & stretching/skewing it to fit, then overlaying the sides to be accurate, it’s still obvious that there is no real scale built into these maps. The Gondola is nowhere near reality:

So we aborted the mission of overlaying this map in favor of simply recreating the runs as Google Earth “paths.”

Here is what it looks like once you add a number of “paths” and “placemarks” in Google Earth, using the map as a reference, and the satellite photo with the missing trees as evidence of where the ski runs actually are:

The paths are color-coded based on type (typical green/blue/black difficulty based on the map) and the Gondola is in red.

If you were using GPS Insight to say, track your Snowcats (which are used to groom the runs regularly), you would be able to run reports on which runs were groomed on which days, for how many hours, etc. This is actually something we’re starting to see some interest in from some ski resorts which is part of the motivation for this exercise (if I had thought about it in advance I could have written off the trip!).

You can see how accurate this is if you take a little time to properly map the trails — We show activity skiing right along Orion, Skyline Trail, and Ridge Run (as well as us taking the lift up ABOVE Ellies — I didn’t take my 8 year old snowboarder on this black (he probably would have done better than me, actually).

Using a combination of a ski trail map and Google Earth with recent imagery, it is easy to see which runs particular GPS data recorded activtity on.

We’re going skiing tomorrow in Pinetop AZ at “Sunrise” park (www.sunriseskipark.com) — here’s their much more straightforward trail map.

I’m done overlaying them, I think everyone gets the point now (on to more vehicle based GPS tracking topics next!)

Thanks,

Rob.

Comments (1)

Jan 05 2009

More GPS snowboard tracking

Category: California,CUSTOM APPLICATIONS OF GPS INSIGHT,Google Earth,GPS Insight Employees,GPS Tracking,Mapping,Overlays,Skiing — rdonat @ 3:00 pm

I realized I didn’t have much data from the prior 2 days’ skiing so I put the tracking device in 20 minute mode and you can see we have more to go on now.

Here you can start to see the (thawed versions of) trails and where the points themselves lie:

Next I will begin to merge the Google Earth version of the mountain with the Heavenly Ski map:

Since the map itself is drawn on a vertical angle, I will need to reshape it, something I need to do anyway as we’ve started working on a project of this sort for a customer. This is a relatively simple thing to do, provided you know how to do it. I don’t, so I’ve got some Photoshop reading to do…

When I figure it out, I’ll finish this overlay & make it plus the data available for you to look at in Google Earth.

Rob.

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