OnDemand App

For the Innovation Centre for Mobility and Societal Change (InnoZ) we have built an Android app as a part of an experiment on the field of autonomous mobility. The purpose of the project was to develop a user interface for the autonomous shuttle Emily . The user of the app should be able to call the vehicle from a random position along the route. Then, the shuttle transports the user to the requested location. While there was already a REST api for controlling the vehicle, important functionalities for a real on-demand service were missing in the back-end. Therefore, we built not only the android app but also a back-end service in python which takes care of authenticating users, recording their journey requests and distributing them across available vehicles.

Using tornado and various additional libraries, we have developed a pragmatical back-end. The API is automated and specified according to OpenAPI standards. The specification is read by Swagger and presented as an interactive API documentation. During development, the project is automatically tested and deployed to our Openshift cluster. Above all Review Apps saved us a lot of time during development, since it allowed us to test every additional feature directly end-to-end.