Routes, stops, and reach for AI travel agents
Find places, route between them, fit them into a time budget, and surface what's on the way. The geospatial layer behind agentic trip planners.
AI travel agents have to handle the full mess of itinerary building. Place name to coordinates, coordinates to a route, route to nearby attractions, attractions back into a time budget. Most of that is geospatial primitives stitched together at runtime.
Footstep ships those primitives in shapes the model can reason over. find_and_route handles 'directions to the closest castle from here' end to end. search_along_route surfaces ranked detours along an existing path. get_isochrone answers 'what can I reach from this hotel in 30 minutes on foot?'
Pair with compare_routes when the agent needs to recommend between walking and cycling. Pair with get_elevation when terrain matters for a hiking leg.
What this looks like in practice
Common shapes mapped to the tools you'd reach for.
Daily-time-budget itinerary
Given a hotel and a 6-hour walking budget, build an isochrone, search for landmarks inside, and route between the top three picks. Returns a polyline you can drop into a map view.
Detour discovery
Pass an existing route and a category like 'cafe' or 'viewpoint'. Get back ranked candidates with detour seconds and where they sit along the route, so the agent can offer options without breaking the schedule.
Mode comparison
When the user asks 'should I walk or cycle?' compare_routes returns both options with distance, duration, and terrain difficulty side by side, plus a one-sentence summary.
The Footstep tools that fit this shape
A focused subset of the catalogue. Click any card for the full reference.
find_and_routeFind a place by name and route to it in one step. Geocode plus route combined.
search_along_routeFind places along a route ranked by how little detour they add.
get_isochroneEverywhere reachable within a time or distance budget. Returns a polygon boundary.
search_placesFind points of interest near a location by category or name.
get_directionsDriving, walking, or cycling directions between locations with terrain analytics.
compare_routesCompare walk vs bike vs drive between the same locations side by side.
Other use cases
Search, rescue, and crisis response
Score where a missing person is most likely to be found. Direct ground teams to the highest-density hexes first.
Read →Logistics and autonomous fleets
Multi-stop optimisation, OD matrices, and corridor search for the agents and backends that move things.
Read →Environmental and field operations
Terrain profiles, reachability polygons, and GPS map matching for ESG reporting, conservation, and field research.
Read →Real estate and property
Geocode listings, model commute reach, score nearby amenities, and overlay terrain risk. The toolkit behind agent-led property search.
Read →Customer-input cleanup
Fix typos, expand abbreviations, validate before geocoding. The reliable pre-step for agents handling user-typed addresses.
Read →Field service and dispatch
Optimise visit order, score reachable jobs from each tech, clean GPS into proof-of-visit records.
Read →Insurance and risk underwriting
Anchor addresses, layer terrain and elevation, assess access from emergency services. Bulk-process portfolios in one call.
Read →Healthcare access and equity
Compute drive-time and walk-time access to facilities, model coverage gaps, place ambulances with travel-time matrices.
Read →Sales and territory planning
Build OD matrices between reps and accounts, draw catchments around offices, normalise lead addresses at scale.
Read →Outdoor and fitness apps
Plan walking, hiking, and cycling routes with explicit difficulty. Snap noisy GPS into clean traces with surface and grade per edge.
Read →Public-sector planning
Model who can reach what, where the gaps are, how transit changes the answer. Reachability and matrix tools for civic planning.
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