Autonomous Navigation System for a Delivery Drone

Abstract

The use of delivery services is an increasing trend worldwide, further enhanced by the COVID pandemic. In this context, drone delivery systems are of great interest as they may allow for faster and cheaper deliveries. This paper presented a navigation system that makes feasible the delivery of parcels with autonomous drones. The system generates a path between a start and a final point and controls the drone to follow this path based on its localization obtained through GPS, 9DoF IMU, and barometer. In the landing phase, information of poses estimated by a marker (ArUco) detection technique using a camera, ultrawideband (UWB) devices, and the drone’s software estimation are merged by utilizing an extended Kalman filter algorithm to improve the landing precision. A vector field-based method controls the drone to follow the desired path smoothly, reducing vibrations or harsh movements that could harm the transported parcel. Real experiments validate the delivery strategy and allow the evaluation of the performance of the adopted techniques. Preliminary results state the viability of our proposal for autonomous drone delivery.