FoxyNav

Introduction

The Bol d’Or race takes place every year at the Geneva lake gathering more than 600 boats and yachts from all around the world. Several rescue teams collaborate in the support of the competition. There are 34 rescue teams around Lake Leman. However, during big events like the Bol d'Or, an additional team is used to coordinate the rescue operations. With their 22 boats, they are responsible to supervise the race and contact the nearest rescue team in case of an emergency.

Porto Central is the name of the coordination centre of these 22 supervision boats. Currently, they communicate only via radio messages and the positioning is done through paper maps. Lake Leman is divided in 311 squares and the precision is therefore limited to them. And this is in the best case, if we suppose that each boat knows in what square it is (in practice it is seldom the case). Porto Central estimates that in case of an emergency only 35% of the navigators are able to transmit their GPS coordinates.

FoxyNav provides a desktop computer application that shows all the Portos (name given to the Porto Central boats) on a map. The coordinator can then move them with his mouse to specific places. On the boat, the user receives the new location to attend on his mobile phone. Coupled to a GPS device, the mobile phone will continuously show the direction to take in order to attend the new position. The mobile phone is also responsible to send each given time interval its position in order to update the coordinator's map.

Snapshots