Autonomous Vehicle Assitant (AVA)

An award winning iOS app

The smartphone software provides navigational assistance for those who want to use self-driving cars for ridesharing services. The software will help people request a ride, find, enter, and exit the car, and travel to their destination. VEMI’s Autonomous Vehicle Assistant (AVA) software earned third place in the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Inclusive Design Challenge, earning a $300,000 prize.

AVA specifically focuses on assisting individuals that are older or visually impaired by providing natural language text-to-speech and augmented reality.

Since autonomous vehicles are projected to be based on a rideshare model, with a subscription payment, the AVA app was designed to work with that model. We employed a great deal of paired programming to develop AVA entirely in Swift. We also used a real-time database in Firebase to interface between the car and the user's AVA app.