GSoC 2026 Enhance Pedestrian Routing Valhalla | Introduction

Introduction

Hi! My name is Francisco Albacete Chicano (but feel free to call me Paco!), and this year I have been selected for the GSoC 2026 with OSM, working on Valhalla Enhance Pedestrian routing project with my mentors Kevin Kreiser and Christian Beiwinkel.

Who am I?

Well, I am a second year student of the University of Murcia (studying computer science), who randomly discovered OpenStreetMap and began with a small programming project to learn more about it! While I was fascinated by it, I discovered OSM had projects for GSoC, I had for sure to take a try! So I started getting in touch with Valhalla as I really enjoy pathfinding algorithms and optimizations. And when I am not coding, I have been playing video games for most of my life and really like to have experiences with my family and friends (even better if there’s beer!).

What is the project about?

The main focus is to improve and implement improvements to the Pedestrian Routing. Try to fix ambiguous navigation, guidance… The goal is to make pedestrian routing take a real step forward! We are still putting the finishing tocuhes on the final objectives and challenges we expect to tackle, so stay tuned because I will be covering all of it in the upcoming diary entries!

About it

I will be documenting the journey, through here and in my personal blog. And just let you know I am extremely excited to contribute to the community and very thankful to be working with such a great team as Kevin Kreiser, Christian Beiwinkel and Nils Nolde.