GPS Tools
Utilities & PersonalRun coordinate mathematics entirely inside FlowRunner with no API key, vendor account, or outbound call. Agents measure distances and bearings and project waypoints as part of routing and dispatch logic.
What This Integration Enables
GPS Tools runs coordinate mathematics inside FlowRunner. Nothing is provisioned, nothing is billed per call, nothing leaves the platform, and no mapping vendor sits between a device ping and the decision it drives. That last point is the one that matters operationally, because the vendor is the part with the rate limit, the invoice and the status page. The connector measures great-circle and ellipsoidal distances, computes initial, final and reverse bearings with a compass abbreviation, projects a waypoint from a bearing and a distance, ranks a list of candidates by proximity, builds and tests bounding boxes, and converts between decimal degrees, degrees minutes seconds and degrees decimal minutes. It also tells you when it is unsure rather than pretending otherwise: Vincenty's solution reports when it failed to converge and falls back to Haversine, and boxes that wrap the antimeridian or reach a pole are flagged instead of silently returning a nonsense span. An agent that gets a flagged answer can escalate. An agent that gets a confident wrong answer cannot.
Without FlowRunner
With FlowRunner
Use Case Scenarios
Assign the job to the nearest available technician
A work order lands with a site coordinate. The agent pulls the current positions of available technicians, calls Find Closest Point with the site as origin and the crew as candidates, and receives the winner along with its distance, bearing and position in the original array so the result maps straight back to the source records. A maximum distance is set, so a crew that is all too far away returns an empty match rather than an assignment nobody can honour. The agent writes the assignment to ServiceNow and posts the ranked shortlist to the dispatch channel in Slack so the coordinator can see who else was close.
A radius filter that a database can actually run
An agent needs every customer within 25 kilometres of a depot, and the customer table has no spatial index. It calls Calculate Bounding Box with the depot coordinate and the radius, gets the four edge values, and uses them directly in a range query against Snowflake. The rectangle is a superset of the circle, so the agent then calls Calculate Distance on each returned row to trim the corners. The result is a proximity filter that costs one cheap indexed query rather than a full table scan or a paid geospatial lookup.
Measuring a route that already happened
A logistics team wants to know what a completed run actually cost in distance, not what the plan said. The agent takes the ordered GPS track for the shift, calls Calculate Path Distance, and receives the total route length plus a leg-by-leg breakdown with each leg's distance and initial bearing. Legs where Vincenty's solution failed to converge are flagged and reported with the Haversine figure instead, so the summary is explicit about which numbers are exact and which are approximate to roughly a third of a percent. The breakdown is written into a workbook and mailed to the operations lead.
Human-in-Loop Highlight
A geofence result is arithmetic, but the thing built on top of it is usually a judgment about a person. Check Point In Bounding Box returns a plain true or false, and it also returns the distance from the box centre and how far outside each edge the point sits when it misses. That second output is the gate. A rectangle is not a real service area, edges are inclusive so a point exactly on the boundary counts as inside, and a device ping carries its own error radius that the box knows nothing about. So when a technician's ping falls outside the job's box by less than the configured margin, or when the box comes back flagged as crossing the antimeridian or clamped to a pole, the agent does not write an off-site status onto the timesheet. It puts the numbers in front of the operations lead in Slack: "Ping for job 5518 sits 40 m outside the east edge of the site box at 07:52. Margin is 100 m. Count as on site, or flag for review?" Attendance and billing records are the kind of thing people dispute months later, which is exactly why this belongs in the automation exceptions queue rather than in a silent branch.
Agent Capabilities
11 actionsDistance and Bearing
5- Calculate Distance Measures the distance between two coordinates using the Haversine great-circle formula, Vincenty's inverse solution on the WGS-84 ellipsoid, or both so the two can be compared. Haversine is accurate to roughly 0.3 percent; Vincenty models the true ellipsoid and is accurate to a fraction of a millimetre but does not converge for nearly antipodal points, where the Haversine figure is returned and the converged flag is set to false. Results come back in the requested unit and simultaneously in metres, kilometres, miles and nautical miles.
- Calculate Path Distance Adds up the leg-by-leg distance along an ordered list of waypoints, returning the total route length plus every leg with its own distance and initial bearing. Accepts up to 5000 points. Used to measure a delivery route, a GPS track or a planned itinerary after the fact.
- Calculate Bearing Computes the compass heading from one coordinate to another, returning the initial bearing to steer on departure, the final bearing on arrival, the reverse bearing back to the start and a 16-point compass abbreviation such as NNE or WSW. All bearings are degrees clockwise from true north.
- Calculate Midpoint Computes the half-way point along the great-circle route between two coordinates. This is not the average of the two latitude and longitude pairs, which matters on long routes and on any pair that crosses the antimeridian. Also returns the bearing from the start to the midpoint and the total distance between the inputs.
- Calculate Destination Point Works out where you end up after travelling a given distance along a given bearing from a starting coordinate. Used to project the edge of a search radius, to plot a waypoint offset from a landmark, or to generate test coordinates. The returned longitude is normalised into the -180 to 180 range so antimeridian crossings are handled correctly.
Proximity
2- Find Closest Point Finds the nearest candidate to an origin from a list, returning the winner with its distance, bearing and position in the original array. Optionally returns the full ranked list and can discard anything beyond a maximum distance, in which case an empty match is reported rather than an error. Used to pick the closest store, depot, driver or pickup locker.
- Sort Points By Distance Sorts a list of coordinates by distance from an origin, nearest or farthest first, annotating each entry with its distance, bearing and compass point and optionally trimming to the first N results. The original array position is preserved so results map back to source records.
Bounding Boxes
3- Calculate Bounding Box Builds the smallest latitude and longitude rectangle that fully contains a circle of a given radius around a centre point, returning the four edges plus south-west and north-east corners. Used to turn a radius filter into a plain indexed database query. Boxes that reach a pole or wrap past the antimeridian are reported through explicit flags.
- Enclose Points In Bounding Box Computes the smallest rectangle containing every point in a list, plus the centre of that rectangle and its width, height and diagonal in metres. Longitudes are handled on the shorter of the two possible spans, so points either side of the antimeridian produce a narrow wrapping box rather than one covering the globe.
- Check Point In Bounding Box Tests whether a coordinate falls inside a rectangle, returning true or false plus the distance from the box centre and how far outside each edge the point sits when it misses. Wrapping boxes are supported and edges are inclusive, so a point exactly on a boundary counts as inside. This is the action behind geofence branching.
Coordinates
1- Convert Coordinates Converts a coordinate pair between decimal degrees, degrees minutes seconds and degrees with decimal minutes. The input format is detected automatically, symbols are optional, and either a hemisphere letter or a leading minus sign sets the sign. All three representations are always returned. Invalid, out-of-range and impossible values are rejected with a clear error rather than coerced.
Frequently Asked Questions
What can FlowRunner do with GPS Tools?
FlowRunner agents can run Calculate Distance, Calculate Path Distance, and Calculate Bearing in GPS Tools, plus 8 more actions.
Does connecting GPS Tools to FlowRunner require OAuth?
No. GPS Tools needs no credentials at all, so there is no key to obtain, store, or rotate.
Can GPS Tools trigger a FlowRunner workflow automatically?
GPS Tools doesn't currently expose triggers in FlowRunner. It connects as an action step inside workflows started by another trigger.
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