My application collects geolocation point from the user every certain amount of time, I am trying to use these points in order to calculate the distance from the first point through all of the points.
please note that when the user moves in a straight line, the geolocation points do not form a straight line, because the points I collect have a margin of error due to inaccuracy, thus I can't use something like Haversine formula because it will give incorrect value (longer distance than real distance)
and I can't use Google Maps Distance API because it calculates the distance between 2 points only, and it will be so expensive to call it 200 times to calculate distance through all points.
and I want to calculate this value on the server-side because of some security rules I have. so using the google maps SDK in the front end to calculate it is not an option either.
Any idea ...
for anyone facing the same problem,I have followed this link https://developers-dot-devsite-v2-prod.appspot.com/maps/documentation/roads/snap
here is my code in PHP
// snap the collected points from user to the nearest road using google API
$fields = array(
'path' => '60.170880,24.942795|60.170879,24.942796|60.170877,24.942796|60.170902,24.942654',
'key' => '<YOUR_KEY_HERE>'
);
$url = "https://roads.googleapis.com/v1/snapToRoads?" . http_build_query($fields, '', '&');
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url );
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$response = curl_exec($ch);
$response = json_decode($response);
$totalDistance = 0;
$previousPoint = null;
foreach ($response->snappedPoints as $pointOnRoad) {
if(!$previousPoint){
$previousPoint = $pointOnRoad;
continue;
}
$totalDistance += getDistance($pointOnRoad->location->latitude, $pointOnRoad->location->longitude,
$previousPoint->location->latitude, $previousPoint->location->longitude);
}
echo $totalDistance;
// calculate distance between 2 geo points
function getDistance($latitude1, $longitude1, $latitude2, $longitude2) {
$earth_radius = 6371;
$dLat = deg2rad($latitude2 - $latitude1);
$dLon = deg2rad($longitude2 - $longitude1);
$a = sin($dLat/2) * sin($dLat/2) + cos(deg2rad($latitude1)) * cos(deg2rad($latitude2)) * sin($dLon/2) * sin($dLon/2);
$c = 2 * asin(sqrt($a));
$d = $earth_radius * $c;
return $d;
}