Draft zone detection with live geodata

Draft zone detection with live geodata

Konrad

What a pleasure: Our work brought us out of the office for cycling in perfect fall weather. Christoph, Jens & Konrad tested our new drafting tool under real conditions, and ride the cycling course of the traditional Schlosstriathlon Moritzburg. Regarding their shape they stated afterward they should have done this more often and earlier ;-) Anyways, this blog is about live tracking of sports events & -activities and processing real-time geodata. Let's focus on the technical side of the ride, now.

Doesn't look like testing our software ... Jens and Konrad sweating while evaluating the sensitivity of our new drafting tool.

Doesn't look like testing our software ... Jens and Konrad sweating while evaluating the sensitivity of our new drafting tool.

Each was equipped with our Pro GPS Tracker, set up to send their coordinates every second to our tracking platform. The geodata is accessible through our API with a delay of about five seconds for further processing. That way 3rd parties can work with live geodata and provide their own exciting applications.

Due to the drafting- and related penalty discussion at triathlons we developed a handy live monitor for drafting based on geodata. The tool evaluates the distance between participants and detects overtaking. Users can flexibly adapt the length of the draft zone and the time limit for moving in the draft zone.

Christoph overtakes Konrad. At 14:27:31 Christoph was moving for 44s in the draft zone behind Konrad.

Christoph overtakes Konrad. At 14:27:31 Christoph was moving for 44s in the draft zone behind Konrad.

Holistic live monitoring for all athletes is an objective solution and makes drafting penalties more transparent, understandable for viewers, and last but not least fair for athletes.

  1. The table sorts all devices in ascending order according to their distance to go.
  2. "To previous"-column shows the distance to the device ahead.
  3. "Draft time"-column starts counting seconds when the device is moving in the draft zone of the device ahead.
  4. "Drafts"-column counts one new draft when drafting takes longer than the set time limit.
  5. All drafts can be hovered. 

Last but not least, you are free to work with our drafting tool at your events. All information about our drafting software can be found in our documentation: https://docs.racemap.com/data-api/grabber#drafting-tool