📍 AI-Powered Disaster Navigation App

🏆 Built at Hack_NCState

🚨 Overview

Natural disasters often leave people struggling to find safe routes, locate shelters, and make quick evacuation decisions—especially when communication networks are unreliable. Inspired by recent events like the LA wildfires, our team developed an AI-powered Disaster Navigation App that provides real-time and offline emergency routing, guiding users to safety while avoiding danger zones.

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🔗 Live Demo: View Here

NOTE: For better performance try in Android or Chrome based browsers.

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🌟 Features

✅ 📡 Emergency Alert Parsing – AI extracts shelter coordinates from broadcast alerts and SMS messages.
✅ 🛣️ Smart Route Optimization – Uses Google Maps API with custom waypoints to dynamically reroute around blocked roads and disaster zones.
✅ 📶 Offline Mode – Pre-caches maps and routes, allowing navigation without internet access.
✅ 🤖 AI-Generated Prevention Plans – Provides personalized safety recommendations based on the user’s location and disaster type.
✅ 🚑 Relief Agency Support – Enables first responders to efficiently navigate directly to danger zones for rescue operations.

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🛠️ Tech Stack

Technology	Purpose
React.js	Frontend development
Google Maps API	Route optimization & navigation
AI (GenAI & NLP)	Extracting shelter coordinates from messages
Geolocation API	Fetching user location
Local Storage / Caching	Offline navigation support
Twilio / SMS API (Future Plan)	Real-time emergency alerts integration

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⚙️ How It Works

1️⃣ User receives an emergency broadcast or SMS with shelter details.
2️⃣ Our AI extracts shelter coordinates from the message.
3️⃣ Google Maps API generates the safest route while avoiding danger zones.
4️⃣ If offline, the app uses pre-saved maps to guide users.
5️⃣ AI gives personalized prompts based on disaster type and user location.

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🚀 Installation & Setup

1️⃣ Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/varundeepakgudhe/Hack_NC_25.git
cd disaster-navigation

2️⃣ Install dependencies:

npm install

3️⃣ Add your Google Maps API key in .env:

REACT_APP_GOOGLE_MAPS_API_KEY=your_api_key_here

4️⃣ Run the app locally:

npm start

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🚀 Running the Disaster Navigation App with Docker

This project is fully containerized with Docker! You can run it in two ways:

1️⃣ One-Time Run (Using Command Line)

If you want to run the app without modifying files, use this command:

docker run -p 3000:3000 \
  -e REACT_APP_GOOGLE_MAPS_API_KEY="your-google-maps-api-key" \
  -e REACT_APP_OPENAI_API_KEY="your-openai-api-key" \
  varundeepakgudhe/disaster-navigation

🔹 This will start the app immediately!
🔹 Replace "your-google-maps-api-key" and "your-openai-api-key" with actual values.

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2️⃣ Persistent Setup (Using .env and Docker Compose)

If you don’t want to enter API keys every time, follow these steps:

📌 Step 1: Create a .env file (in the same directory as docker-compose.yml):

REACT_APP_GOOGLE_MAPS_API_KEY=your-google-maps-api-key
REACT_APP_OPENAI_API_KEY=your-openai-api-key

📌 Step 2: Create a docker-compose.yml file:

version: "3.8"
services:
  react-app:
    image: varundeepakgudhe/disaster-navigation
    ports:
      - "3000:3000"
    env_file:
      - .env

📌 Step 3: Run the app

docker-compose up

🔹 Now the app automatically loads API keys from .env
🔹 No need to enter keys every time! 🎉

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📌 Notes

✅ Make sure Docker is installed before running these commands.
✅ This app runs on http://localhost:3000 by default.
✅ To stop the container, press Ctrl + C or run docker stop <container_id>.

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📝 Challenges We Faced

🔹 Dynamically avoiding danger zones using Google Maps API required fine-tuning waypoints.
🔹 Extracting coordinates from emergency messages with AI needed NLP optimization.
🔹 Balancing real-time and offline functionality for disaster scenarios was crucial.
🔹 Crafting effective AI prompts for GenAI using the Gemini model while accurately fetching relevant data from MongoDB was challenging.

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🎯 Future Enhancements

Smart Insurance Policy Recommendations and Claim Assistance

Community-Driven & Government Collaboration

Crowdfunding & Donations for Disaster Relief

Volunteer Matching to Shelters and Disaster zones

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📢 Team & Acknowledgments

💡 Built at Hack_NCState 🏆

💻 Developed by Varun Deepak Gudhe, Mugdha Joshi, Soubhagya Akkena, Jahnavi Panchavati.

🙏 Thanks to Hack_NCState organizers for an incredible hackathon experience! Checkout our Devpost

🚀 Let’s make disaster preparedness smarter and safer for everyone.