Calculate the distance between 2 coordinates in the same row in R

Question

I have a data frame [df] like this:

df<-structure(list(  Latitude = c(-23.8, -23.8, -23.9, -23.9), 
                     Longitude = c(-49.6, -49.3, -49.4, -49.8), 
                     Latitude1 = c(-23.4, -23.7, -23.4, -23.8), 
                     Longitude1 = c(-49.7, -49.4, -49.6, -49.7)),
                     class = "data.frame", row.names = c(NA, -4L))

The dataframe contains the GPS coordinates of 2 points and I would like to calculate the distance in meters between these 2 points in every row. I would only like to get the distance between the 2 points in each row, not a distance matrix.

The desired result would look like this:

Latitude   Longitude   Latitude1   Longitude1   Distance_m
-23.8      -49.6       -23.4       -49.7        53

I tried the geosphere package, but I was not able to get the right results.

Is there any way of doing this, please?

Thank you for any suggestions.

Answer 1

Check the distm function from geosphere package:

apply(df, 1, function(x)distm(c(x[1],x[2]),c(x[3],x[4]),fun = distGeo))

Answer 2

withing the tidyverse // could not reproduce your desired output of 53 though... ?

library(geosphere)
library(tidyverse)
df %>%
  mutate(distance = pmap(list(a = Longitude, 
                              b = Latitude, 
                              x = Longitude1,
                              y = Latitude1), 
                          ~ geosphere::distGeo( c(..1, ..2), c(..3, ..4))))

#   Latitude Longitude Latitude1 Longitude1 distance
# 1    -23.8     -49.6     -23.4      -49.7 45461.49
# 2    -23.8     -49.3     -23.7      -49.4 15053.19
# 3    -23.9     -49.4     -23.4      -49.6 59016.34
# 4    -23.9     -49.8     -23.8      -49.7 15048.01