Brunner, Gino (ETH Zurich), Szebedy, Bence (ETH Zurich), Tanner, Simon (ETH Zurich), Wattenhofer, Roger (ETH Zurich)

The Urban Last Mile Problem: Autonomous Drone Delivery to Your Balcony

Scheduled for presentation during the Regular Session "UAS Applications V" (ThC2), Thursday, June 13, 2019, 16:00−16:20, Heritage C

2020 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS), June 11-14, 2019, Athens, Greece

This information is tentative and subject to change. Compiled on April 24, 2024

Abstract

Drone delivery has been a hot topic in the industry in the past few years. However, existing approaches either focus on rural areas or rely on centralized drop-off locations from where the last mile delivery is performed. In this paper we tackle the problem of autonomous last mile delivery in urban environments using an off-the-shelf drone. We build a prototype system that is able to fly to the approximate delivery location using GPS and then find the exact drop-off location using visual navigation. The drop-off location could, e.g., be on a balcony or porch, and simply needs to be indicated by a visual marker on the wall or window. We test our system components in simulated environments, including the visual navigation and collision avoidance. Finally, we deploy our drone in a real-world environment and show how it can find the drop-off point on a balcony. To stimulate future research in this topic we open source our code.