Apartment Package Delivery with UAV
The last mile delivery problem is one of the most significant problems today in e-commerce and supply chain management. It presents an enormous opportunity for robotic innovation. While the predominant method continues to be human delivery, many promising solutions have appeared and are set to replace the inefficient and monotonous process. These include Alibaba’s tea delivery aircraft, Amazon’s Prime Air drone, NURO’s self driving car, Starship’s delivery bot, and many more.
All of these systems rely on human pickup at the roadside, and while convenient for rural and sparse housing environments, don’t fully replace human deliverers in many cities, who often reach the exact apartment within a building for drop-off.
Having to travel to the roadside for pickup might be a nuisance, but considering the current world event with COVID-19, we realize how important it is to maintain social distance in pandemic times. Package pickup presents a possibility of in-human contact in an otherwise socially distant system.
We propose a UAV apartment delivery system to extend last-mile delivery solutions to individual apartments, where the flexibility of UAV movements can guarantee convenient and contact-less deliveries. The system uses GPS for general localization, visual servoing with two cameras for pinpoint accuracy on to packages and platforms marked with AprilTags, picks up a package with electromagnets, and delivers it to a platform of arbitrary height representing individual apartment balconies. A picture of the drone is shown in below, with the box attached to the bottom.
