BloomBus Shuttle-Tracker shown at SVURS

Nicholas Ashenfelter and Michael O’Donnell with their poster

Computer Science majors Nicholas Ashenfelter and Michael O’Donnell presented a poster at the 2019 Susquehanna Valley Undergraduate Research Symposium (SVURS), describing their work on the BloomBus project to track campus shuttles. The symposium, held at Bucknell University, showcases work done by students at Bloomsburg, Bucknell, Susquehanna University, and Geisinger Medical Center.

The BloomBus project aims to install GPS trackers in the campus shuttle buses to monitor their locations, and use a smartphone-based app to predict a bus’ arrival time at its next bus stop. This will assist shuttle users who wish to avoid excessive waits out-of-doors in bad weather. Commercial systems exits to provide this function, but at a substantially greater cost than the BloomBus project’s equipment and maintenance. Started by Rio Weber and David Pany, it has been under development by successive groups of studentsfor the last few years. 2019 alumnus John Gibson continues to assist Nicholas and Michael on the software development.

The project has reached a testing stage at which GPS units are ready to be deployed in shuttles, and tracking data collected to build models for predicting arrival times at the various bus stops.