Is there a GPS that can plan the best route for multiple waypoints & accept driver input at each waypoint?

January 25, 2012 3:28 PM

I'm looking for a gps that will allow me to upload a series of waypoints, define the best route based on those waypoints, and then await my input when each is visited. Does this exist? (details inside)

I'm the proprietor of a small curbside recycling business. As the business continues to grow, route planning has risen as something we can do more efficiently. I've seen a few online services that do what I'd like to do, but I'd rather do it with a GPS if possible.

I want to:

1. Import a list of waypoints to the GPS
2. Have the GPS calculate the best route
3. Tell the GPS when I have completed an action at a certain route (recycle bin present vs. absent)
4. Go to the next stop

Is this possible? Are there any off-the-shelf GPS units that can do this kind of work?

posted by stuboo to technology (5 answers total)

If you have an Android phone then the Best Route app can easily handle this.
posted by Burhanistan at 3:45 PM on January 25

A lot of commercial GPSs, i.e. the sort designed for truck drivers, have multi-stop route optimization, and almost all GPSs can accept waypoints from off the device once you get them into the right format, althoughyour third requirement seems kind of niche. How would you want to get this information (i.e. which stops had recycling) off the GPS afterward?
posted by kindall at 3:49 PM on January 25

@kindall It doesn't really matter. If I could grab it from an SD card, that would be fine.
posted by stuboo at 3:54 PM on January 25

@Burhanistan The app looks great, but we need to be able to add more than 50 waypoints - sorry I didn't include this to start.
posted by stuboo at 3:57 PM on January 25

The marking off the waypoint as bin present or absent sounds a lot like marking off geocaches as found or not found. I don't know of any geocaching software that optimizes the route between caches, though. If you found something like that, it should not be very difficult for someone with a little knowledge of XML to make your waypoints look like a geocaching GPX file. An XSLT transformation could then take the found / not found data off the GPS and convert it into a CSV spreadsheet of bin present / absent, assuming that would be a more useful format for the data back at the office.

The part that I would not know how to do would be to somehow mash up the route optimization with the geocaching software, if such a combination does not already exist.
posted by Orinda at 7:08 PM on January 25 [2 favorites]