GPS Insight Blog » Las Vegas

Mar 17 2009

Tracking the 120 mile LAPD Baker to Vegas Relay Race

Category: CUSTOM APPLICATIONS OF GPS INSIGHT, California, Las Vegas, Mapping, Miscellaneous — rdonat @ 8:51 pm

Los Angeles Police Department puts on a yearly race from LA area to Las Vegas. It’s 120 MILES long, through the desert, at night. 242 teams of 20 runners each participate. That’s 4,840 runners! (running 6 miles each).

It’s called the Baker to Vegas Relay.

A customer of ours, Crown Disposal sponsored one of the teams this year — the San Fernando/South Pasadena/Compton team.

Their head of IT, Jerry Prieto, asked us to loan them a GPS device and an account where they could view the progress of the race, to supplement their elaborate communications already in place to track the race.

We are happy to do so — Crown Disposal has been a GPS Insight customer for years and has given us ideas for many improvements to our product (the Speed Bands report, imported rolloff locations color-coded by age, etc).

Using an infrequently used aspect of our product “Customer Sites,” I was able to put a publicly available website out there for anyone to watch the race progress. It took about 1 minute to do this, and is seen here:

And in Satellite View we see where they ended (at the Las Vegas Hilton):

Anyway, the race commenced Saturday night, and the vehicle should have taken 120 miles to get there.

Here is a track of that vehicle, and since I really don’t know where the race physically began, I traced back from Vegas roughly 120 miles to start my “search.”

This screen shot shows I’m not too far off — the light green dots are speeding events (76 MPH max, in this case then slowing down to 6 MPH) prior to stopping at the beginning of the race:

The vehicle had driven 113.5 miles that day — we’ll subtract that from the ending mileage for the day to arrive at 120 miles in just a minute.

They leave out at 10:40:57:

From the time they got to the starting point (on Death Valley Rd., by the way, in the middle of NOWHERE…), it was just about an hour before they started their team race.

Nice terrain to have to run up! — We’re tracking the vehicle which is the lead for the team — they had several vehicles to carry all the 20 runners.

At least whoever was running at 3:21 AM got to go downhill:

They arrive at the Hilton (the finish line) at 7:55 AM — 123.4 miles and 21 hours, 15 minutes later. That’s an average of 5.65 Miles Per Hour.

The car drove a few extra miles doubling back, etc., relative to the racers’ 120 mile trek (although it might be a few more miles, I didn’t measure it myself…).

Anyway, we’re happy to help with this fantastic 25 year old event, and appreciate Crown Disposal’s invitation to help them help LAPD and the world’s “biggest police chase” as they call it.

Rob.

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Nov 17 2007

Map books meet GPS Insight

Category: CUSTOM APPLICATIONS OF GPS INSIGHT, GPS Tracking, Las Vegas, Mapping, Overlays, Vehicle Tracking — rdonat @ 3:20 pm

I see many of our customers at their locations and they have map books out frequently. A map book is a book with all of the various low-level maps for a city on single pages, and often times, when dispatching a driver somewhere, they will tell them they need to go to “Map book Las Vegas, Page 25, 5D (let’s say “Heather St.”).

I bought a couple major metro map books today (Phoenix and Las Vegas) thinking we could help our customers in these markets by integrating the map boundary definitions into GPS Insight (but not the images/content – that would be copyright infringement). We want to help the map company sell MORE books because it will be much easier for our customers to use them if we can integrate.

Scanning a couple of pages for MY use, I’m able to pull them into GPS Insight as an overlay (I also talk about overlays and similar concepts for the US Army here):

Then by scanning and overlaying an actual “map page” we can get precise boundaries for each page:

We can then create a “placemark” and put the “pin” precisely at the bottom left corner of the box:

Then we are able to quickly determine the latitude/longitude of each of the 4 box corners. A shortcut for doing so is to right-click the placemark and choose “directions from” which populates the latitude/longitude into the “directions” box:

Because the boxes above/below/next to each share the same points, these latitudes/longitudes don’t need to be computed for every single corner.

Now that we have that information, I will have the ability to put a new capability into GPS Insight which does the following:

Takes a street address and quickly determines the Map Page/Quadrant
Allows the user to enter the map page & alpha-numeric “box” and takes them there
Allow the user to report on activity within a certain map page or even alpha-numeric box

We can do the first one simply right now by typing in the address and simply viewing which map page/alphanumeric box the address is in.

It will take a little bit of development time to allow us to choose a map page and “A-6″ style box in order to take us there, but this is something which we will easily complete within a few hours of work given GPS Insight’s quick turnaround on custom requirements such as this.

Then running a report for a particular area can be done automatically as well, but I will do so manually here using our existing polygon geofence capabilities:

Create a polygon geofence around the square (whether the map page or just a alphanumeric box in question):

We can be EXTREMELY precise when defining the geofence:

Here is the full polygon:

Then we can run a quick report on “Page24″ within GPS Insight to see which vehicles were there, when, and for how long:

7 vehicles went to this location, based on our extremely accurate report — this report completes within 10 seconds and runs through tens of thousands of pieces of information to give you exactly the information you require:

Once we get the map page enhancements into the GPS Insight product, we’ll probably make them freely available, and I’ll update this blog entry. We will document this where we document all of our product enhancements at http://support.gpsinsight.com.

Thanks,

Rob.

Tags: gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps vehicle tracking

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Nov 03 2007

Proving a vehicle was towed with GPS Insight

Category: Ad Hoc Reports, CUSTOM APPLICATIONS OF GPS INSIGHT, GPS Tracking, Las Vegas, Truck Tracking, Vehicle Tracking — rdonat @ 12:04 pm

Occasionally for large customers, I will print out a large overview of a day’s data, since we have a large format plotter which can print enormous (3 1/2 by 6 foot) images.

I had a few minutes the other day & decided to do this for a large Las Vegas based customer when I noticed what looked like an anomaly in their data. There was a long line connecting two position “pins” which was not “OK.” Since we report location every 2 minutes, it looked like the vehicle magically transported itself 8 miles away.

I hoped this wasn’t a problem with their vehicle’s GPS Tracking device so I looked at it, & realized it may have been towed to that facility. This customer has lots of large delivery vehicles and there’s no reason they couldn’t have used one to “deliver” another without the vehicle being turned on (maybe to save gas, or they didn’t have a driver to take it over there).

Here is the image with the anomaly:

Zooming down, it is simple to identify which vehicle this was — LVD-15405-18, with a 59 minute ’stop’ (tow) beginning at 4:12 PM.

Now here is the hard part — there are tens of thousands of points — we need to filter out ONLY the vehicle which may have been towed, and the vehicles which could have potentially towed it, as well as just the data points from the time it was towed. Otherwise there is simply too much data to be able to see what happened here and get to the bottom of things. Thankfully that’s what GPS Insight allows our customers to do very easily, using something called the “time slider” and by using the inherent strengths of Google Earth.

We go to the opposite side of the long by clicking the next point in that vehicle’s history, an idle stop (blue) at 5:11 PM, where the vehicle “appeared” spontaneously, and see there was only one other truck there that day — that makes it easy to view ONLY those two trucks at once. One (our towed one with the long line) has a orangish-red line, and the other vehicle ahs a green line and is truck LVD-40209-RIG:

Because we know the 2 trucks, we can easily look at ONLY their history and because we know the vehicle was towed between 16:12 and 17:11 (4:12 PM and 5:11 PM) we can use the “time slider” to show ONLY the location “points” during that time & a little bit before & after. It shows exactly what I thought — the vehicle “towing” the other vehicle leaves that location shortly after it stops at 4:12, and arrives just a couple minutes before it starts again at its new location at 5:11 PM.

I have put big red arrows to show the direction it traveled to get there, and have highlighed the fact that it was just pulling in at 5:05 PM, 6 minutes before the vehicle was started up again, probably to back it off of the large delivery vehicle it was parked upon:

Another way to quantify this would be to create a “TowStart” and “TowStop” landmark at each of the two ends of the line and then run a route report for them for that day to see which vehicles went from one to the other — this is done by clicking on “Landmark: Create from point” which brings up this screen to easily place/adjust your landmarks.

Routes are a good topic for another blog article, so I’ll just show you how easy it is to create a route in our system, and the next article I will cover this topic in greater detail:

In a nutshell, with no knowledge of this customer’s business activity today, I was able to gain insight into an event which occurred to one of their trucks. It was towed by another one of their trucks, and evidence of this fact took only a couple minutes to get out of tens of thousands of data points, using GPS Insight. That’s what we do — give our customers (and sometimes ourselves) insight into what their fleets are doing at all times.

Thanks,
Rob.

Tags: gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps vehicle tracking

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Sep 15 2007

Tour your facilities and tracked vehicles with GPS Insight & our 3-D mapping capabilities

Category: GPS Tracking, Las Vegas, Truck Tracking, Vehicle Tracking — rdonat @ 1:32 pm

Using GPS Insight, there are a number of “built in” features that aren’t always immediately obvious. We have a customer in Las Vegas which has 50 limos/shuttles, and they take their guests/visitors from the hotels to the various casinos/shows.

Since Vegas is pretty exciting to view using this technology, we’ll put together a nice example of how to put a moving “current status” on a plasma in their dispatch or headquartes to get a good feel for what’s going on.

But what if you want to see actual casino valet areas & who is waiting where?

Using GPS Insight, you can then choose this option (a 3-D current status, with a 15 minute trail, leaving detail points for any recent stops (within the last 15 minutes). This looks like the following:

You can easily click on each vehicle to show their current status, but let’s put a “tour” together for some important places:

You create a “placemark” within Google Earth and can make it any icon you like, height/color/size (or invisible, really). The important thing is what you name it and where you place it, and that you “Snapshot current view” when you are looking at the place the way you want to see it in the future. You can always change the default view for any object in Google Earth by right-clicking and choosing “snapshot view.” Then you go back to that exact view (location/height/tilt/etc.) every time you double-click that object.

Now place a number of these locations/snapshots into a folder within Google Earth.

It may look like this:

You can press the “play” button which will show them in order and you will then see the set of “interest areas” with real-time data about which vehicles are there, how long they’ve been stopped, how recently they left, etc. You can adjust options like how quickly to “fly to” each place, how long to stay there, how many times to play the tour (”infinite” is recommended), etc.

Here is a very small/low-resolution movie of the “tour” we put together:

CLICK HERE !!! MOVIE OF GPS Insight vehicle tracking tour in Las Vegas

This method of “placemarking” allows the dispatch to see the current status of your fleet, at each of your important locations, almost like there are security cameras there. But rather than put security cameras in every single potential place, you only have to create a quick “tour” consisting of many placemarks with appropriate “snapshots” and play the tour according to your options. Then every 10 seconds, your view will change and you will see what is happening around town with your fleet, customers, and places of interest. Or choose 30 seconds, 5, etc. — you can configure this just how you need it.

Rob.

Tags: gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps vehicle tracking

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