Ini Rider - A Car Pooling Application Using Thingy 91

Project : iNi Rider (a Ride-sharing solution)

Purpose and Background:

One of the greatest achievements of mankind is the advancements made in speedy transportation, but that also has a negative consequence of environmental degradation. Transport sector is the main cause for pollution and exhaust fumes from the motor vehicles are one of the major sources of atmospheric pollution. The rapid increase of the vehicles on roads without any actual restriction are significantly attributing to an environmental crisis with increased air pollution and depletion of natural resources like fossil fuels from which transport fuels are primarily derived. In urban transport modes, the number of cars and their consumption of energy are rapidly increasing every year. Hence, the agendas for control measures to mitigate the impact of transportation on environment are of prime importance.

Ride-sharing is the concept of arranging shared transportation trips in short span with other people who have the same route of commute. The benefits of adopting Ride-sharing concept are multidimensional. Ride-sharing services would significantly reduce the number of cars and bikes on the road enabling positively impacting the environment by reducing the carbon footprint, decreasing the fuel consumption in-turn decreasing the depletion of fuel resources. It also benefits the passengers in saving fuel costs, travel costs and provides a means to contribute towards the environment on an everyday basis.

Solution Architecture:

iNi Rider is a car ride-sharing / pooling application built using flutter, utilizing the GPS capabilities of the Nordic Thingy 91 to collect the location coordinates of the cars. The iNi Rider API Service is a backend service that collects and manages the data required for the iNi Rider application.  The location of the car is collected using the Nordic Thingy 91 via MQTT protocol to AWS IoT Core to showcase the capabilities of the nRF9160 cellular IoT System-in-Package.

Nordic Semiconductor's Nordic Thingy:91 multi-sensor prototyping kit is ideal for cellular IoT projects using the nRF9160 system-in-package (SiP).By integrating an application processor, multimode LTE-M/NB-IoT/GNSS modem, RF front-end (RFFE) and power management in a 10x16x1.04 mm package, it offers the most compact solution for cellular IoT (cIoT) on the market.

The location tracking capabilities of the iNi rider application is explained here. The complete project documentation can be found here.

Here is the short video of the iNi Rider application, showcasing the major features.