Autonomous aerial delivery vehicles have gained significant interest in the last decade. This has been enabled by technological advancements in aerial manipulators and novel grippers with enhanced force to weight ratios. Furthermore, improved control schemes and vehicle dynamics are better able to model the payload and improved perception algorithms to detect key features within the unmanned aerial vehicle's (UAV) environment. In this survey, a systematic review of the technological advancements and open research problems of autonomous aerial delivery vehicles is conducted. First, various types of manipulators and grippers are discussed in detail, along with dynamic modelling and control methods. Then, landing on static and dynamic platforms is discussed. Subsequently, risks such as weather conditions, state estimation and collision avoidance to ensure safe transit is considered. Finally, delivery UAV routing is investigated which categorises the topic into two areas: drone operations and drone-truck collaborative operations.
Current drone delivery solutions mainly focus on single package delivery using one drone. However, the recent developments in drone technology enable a drone to deliver multiple packages in a single trip. We use the nearest destination first strategy for the faster delivery of packages in a skyway network. This demonstration is a proof-of-concept prototype for the multi-package delivery in urban airspace following a skyway network. We deploy and test this multi-package drone delivery in an indoor testbed environment using a 3D model of Sydney CBD. Demo: https://youtu.be/YTwsIfUvWPc
Current drone delivery systems mostly focus on point-to-point package delivery. We present a multi-stop drone service system to deliver packages anywhere anytime within a specified geographic area. We define a skyway network which takes into account flying regulations, including restricted areas and no-fly zones. The skyway nodes typically represent building rooftops which may act as both recharging stations and delivery destinations. A heuristic-based A* algorithm is used to compute an optimal path from source to destination taking into account a number of constraints, including delivery time…
In this paper, the supervisory control of a Discrete Event System (DES) analyses states and events to construct an autonomous package delivery system. The delivery system includes a legged robot in order to autonomously navigate uneven indoor terrain and a conveyor belt for transporting the package to the legged robot.The aim of the paper is using the theory of supervisory control of DES to supervise and control machine's state and event and ensure robots autonomously collaborate. By applying the theory, we show the collaboration of two individual robots to deliver goods in a multi-floor envir…
We propose a novel service-oriented architecture for drone-based multi-package delivery in a skyway network. The proposed architecture provides a high-level design for deploying a skyway network in a city for the effective provisioning of drone services. We propose a graph-based heuristic to reduce the search space for optimal service selection in the skyway network. We then find an optimal solution using the selected drone services under a set of constraints. We conduct experiments to demonstrate the efficiency of our proposed approach.
In this work, we present a system that enables delivery drones to autonomously navigate and deliver packages at various locations around a house according to the desire of the recipient and without the need for any external markers as currently used. This development is motivated by recent advancements in deep learning that can potentially supplant the specialized markers presently used by delivery drones for identifying sites at which to deliver packages. The proposed system is more natural in that it takes instruction on where to deliver the package as input, similar to the instructions prov…
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）；Baden-Wuerttemberg Cooperative State University (DHBW)（巴登-符腾堡合作州立大学（DHBW））
We autonomously direct a small quadcopter package delivery Uncrewed Aerial Vehicle (UAV) or "drone" to take off, fly a specified route, and land for a total of 209 flights while varying a set of operational parameters. The vehicle was equipped with onboard sensors, including GPS, IMU, voltage and current sensors, and an ultrasonic anemometer, to collect high-resolution data on the inertial states, wind speed, and power consumption. Operational parameters, such as commanded ground speed, payload, and cruise altitude, are varied for each flight. This large data set has a total flight time of 10 …
We consider the problem of controlling a large fleet of drones to deliver packages simultaneously across broad urban areas. To conserve energy, drones hop between public transit vehicles (e.g., buses and trams). We design a comprehensive algorithmic framework that strives to minimize the maximum time to complete any delivery. We address the multifaceted complexity of the problem through a two-layer approach. First, the upper layer assigns drones to package delivery sequences with a near-optimal polynomial-time task allocation algorithm. Then, the lower layer executes the allocation by periodic…
Drones have been considered as an alternative means of package delivery to reduce the delivery cost and time. Due to the battery limitations, the drones are best suited for last-mile delivery, i.e., the delivery from the package distribution centers (PDCs) to the customers. Since a typical delivery system consists of multiple PDCs, each having random and time-varying demands, the dynamic drone-to-PDC allocation would be of great importance in meeting the demand in an efficient manner. In this paper, we study the dynamic UAV assignment problem for a drone delivery system with the goal of provid…
Autonomous Aerial Manipulation via Contextual Contrastive Meta Reinforcement Learning
National Key Laboratory of Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University（南京大学计算机软件新技术国家重点实验室）；School of Artificial Intelligence, Nanjing University（南京大学人工智能学院）；Faculty of Robot Science and Engineering, Northeastern University（东北大学机器人科学与工程学院）；National Key Lab of Autonomous Intelligent Unmanned Systems, Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学自主智能无人系统国家重点实验室）
Institute of Embedded Systems（嵌入式系统研究所）；Zurich University of Applied Sciences（苏黎世应用科学大学）
Stand-alone functions additional to a UAV flight-controller, such as safety-relevant flight-path monitoring or payload-monitoring and control, may be SORA-required or advised for specific flight paths of delivery-drones. These functions, articulated as discrete electronic components either internal or external to the main fuselage, can be networked with other on-board electronics systems. Such an integration requires respecting the integrity levels of each component on the network both in terms of function and in terms of power-supply. In this body of work we detail an intra-component communic…
In recent years, autonomous robots have become ubiquitous in research and daily life. Among many factors, public datasets play an important role in the progress of this field, as they waive the tall order of initial investment in hardware and manpower. However, for research on autonomous aerial systems, there appears to be a relative lack of public datasets on par with those used for autonomous driving and ground robots. Thus, to fill in this gap, we conduct a data collection exercise on an aerial platform equipped with an extensive and unique set of sensors: two 3D lidars, two hardware-synchr…
Service delivery is set to experience a major paradigm shift with fast advances in drone technologies coupled with higher expectations from customers and increased competition. We propose a novel service-oriented approach to enable the ubiquitous delivery of packages in a drone-operated skyway network. We discuss the benefits, framework and architecture, contemporary approaches, open challenges and future visioned directions of service-based drone deliveries.
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles grow more popular by the day and applications for them are crossing boundaries of science and industry, with everything from aerial photography to package delivery to disaster management benefiting from the technology. But before they become commonplace, there are challenges to be solved to make them reliable and safe. The following paper discusses the challenges associated with the precision landing of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, including methods for sensing and control and their merits and shortcomings for various applications.
University of the Western Cape（西开普大学）；Cartage University（迦太基大学）
The use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in Data transport has attracted a lot of attention and applications, as a modern traffic engineering technique used in data sensing, transport, and delivery to where infrastructure is available for its interpretation. Due to UAVs constraints such as limited power lifetime, it has been necessary to assist them with ground sensors to gather local data which has to be transferred to UAVs upon visiting the sensors. The management of such ground sensor communication together with a team of flying UAVs constitutes an interesting data muling problem which st…
Mansoura University（曼苏拉大学）；Faculty of Computers and Information, Mansoura University（曼苏拉大学计算机与信息学院）
Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) quadrotor is a UAV with four rotors. The quadrotor control is a difficult task because the four-wheel system is inefficient. The purpose of this paper is to provide specifications and implement a separate quad system that integrates data from the camera and IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit) to allow high -resolution optical transmission. In this paper, a separate quad system was proposed. The system specification is specified. The system application introduced the SolidWorks design of the system, the mathematical modeling of the pickup and delivery (PDP) problem. Th…
TU Dortmund University（多特蒙德工业大学）；Communication Networks Institute（通信网络研究所）
The integration of small-scale Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) into Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSs) will empower novel smart-city applications and services. After the unforeseen outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the public demand for delivery services has multiplied. Mobile robotic systems inherently offer the potential for minimizing the amount of direct human-to-human interactions with the parcel delivery process. The proposed system-of-systems consists of various complex aspects such as assigning and distributing delivery jobs, establishing and maintaining reliable communication …
There is an increasing demand for using Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), known as drones, in different applications such as packages delivery, traffic monitoring, search and rescue operations, and military combat engagements. In all of these applications, the UAV is used to navigate the environment autonomously - without human interaction, perform specific tasks and avoid obstacles. Autonomous UAV navigation is commonly accomplished using Reinforcement Learning (RL), where agents act as experts in a domain to navigate the environment while avoiding obstacles. Understanding the navigation environ…
A Modular Pneumatic Soft Gripper Design for Aerial Grasping and Landing
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；Hong Kong Center for Construction Robotics（香港建造机器人中心）；Research Centre of Unmanned Autonomous Systems（无人自主系统研究中心）；Department of Aeronautical and Aviation Engineering（航空及民航工程系）；Department of Mechanical Engineering（机械工程系）
We propose a novel framework for swarm-based drone delivery services with in-flight energy recharging. The framework aims to enhance the delivery time of multiple packages by reducing the number of stops and recharging times at intermediate stations. The proposed framework considers various intrinsic and extrinsic delivery constraints. We propose to use support drones whose sole purpose is to recharge other drones in the swarm during their flight. In this respect, we compute the optimal set of optimal support drones to minimize the probability of delivery services and recharging time at the ne…
New Jersey Institute of Technology（新泽西理工学院）；Universiti Tenaga Nasional（国家能源大学）；Western Michigan University（西密歇根大学）；Tafila Technical University（塔菲拉技术大学）；University of Idaho（爱达荷大学）
The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is growing rapidly across many civil application domains including real-time monitoring, providing wireless coverage, remote sensing, search and rescue, delivery of goods, security and surveillance, precision agriculture, and civil infrastructure inspection. Smart UAVs are the next big revolution in UAV technology promising to provide new opportunities in different applications, especially in civil infrastructure in terms of reduced risks and lower cost. Civil infrastructure is expected to dominate the more that $45 Billion market value of UAV usage. …
Cardiff University（卡迪夫大学）；Aneurin Bevan University Health Board（安奈林·贝文大学健康委员会）；Lakeside Labs GmbH（湖畔实验室有限公司）
This article analyzes two classes of job selection policies that control how a network of autonomous aerial vehicles delivers goods from depots to customers. Customer requests (jobs) occur according to a spatio-temporal stochastic process not known by the system. If job selection uses a policy in which the first job (FJ) is served first, the system may collapse to instability by removing just one vehicle. Policies that serve the nearest job (NJ) first show such threshold behavior only in some settings and can be implemented in a distributed manner. The timing of job selection has significant i…
This article describes a software package called ROS georegistration intended for use with the Robot Operating System (ROS) and the Gazebo 3D simulation environment. ROSgeoregistration provides tools for the simulation, test and deployment of aerial georegistration algorithms and is made available with a link provided in the paper. A model creation package is provided which downloads multi-spectral images from the Google Earth Engine database and, if necessary, incorporates these images into a single, possibly very large, reference image. Additionally a Gazebo plugin which uses the real-time s…
Robert Bosch Center for Cyber-Physical Systems（罗伯特·博世信息物理系统研究中心）；Department of Aerospace Engineering（航空航天工程系）；Indian Institute of Science（印度科学学院）
Aerial package transportation often requires complex spatial and temporal specifications to be satisfied in order to ensure safe and timely delivery from one point to another. It is usually efficient to transport versatile payloads using multiple UAVs that can work collaboratively to achieve the desired task. The complex temporal specifications can be handled coherently by applying Signal Temporal Logic (STL) to dynamical systems. This paper addresses the problem of waypoint navigation of a multi-UAV payload system under temporal specifications using higher-order time-varying control barrier f…
TriDeliver: Cooperative Air-Ground Instant Delivery with UAVs, Couriers, and Crowdsourced Ground Vehicles
Hong Kong JC STEM Lab of Smart City and Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong（香港JC STEM实验室（智慧城市）及城市大学计算机科学系）；State Key Laboratory of Complex & Critical Software Environment, and College of Computer Science and Technology, National University of Defense Technology（复杂与关键软件环境国家重点实验室及国防科技大学计算机科学与技术学院）；School of Computer Science and Technology, Xidian University（西安电子科技大学计算机科学与技术学院）；National Key Laboratory of Big Data and Decision, National University of Defense Technology（大数据与决策国家重点实验室，国防科技大学）；School of Data Science, Lingnan University（岭南大学数据科学学院）；School of Accounting and Finance, Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学会计与金融学院）
The off-the-shelf drones are simple to operate and easy to maintain aerial systems. However, due to proprietary flight software, these drones usually do not provide any open-source interface which can enable them for autonomous flight in research or teaching. This work introduces a package for ROS1 and ROS2 for straightforward interfacing with off-the-shelf drones from the Parrot ANAFI family. The developed ROS package is hardware agnostic, allowing connecting seamlessly to all four supported drone models. This framework can connect with the same ease to a single drone or a team of drones from…
University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；University of California Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Harvard University（哈佛大学）；Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学）；Google Brain（谷歌大脑）
Autonomous-mobile cyber-physical machines are part of our future. Specifically, unmanned-aerial-vehicles have seen a resurgence in activity with use-cases such as package delivery. These systems face many challenges such as their low-endurance caused by limited onboard-energy, hence, improving the mission-time and energy are of importance. Such improvements traditionally are delivered through better algorithms. But our premise is that more powerful and efficient onboard-compute should also address the problem. This paper investigates how the compute subsystem, in a cyber-physical mobile machin…
Autonomous delivery of goods using a MAV is a difficult problem, as it poses high demand on the MAV's control, perception and manipulation capabilities. This problem is especially challenging if the exact shape, location and configuration of the objects are unknown. In this paper, we report our findings during the development and evaluation of a fully integrated system that is energy efficient and enables MAVs to pick up and deliver objects with partly ferrous surface of varying shapes and weights. This is achieved by using a novel combination of an electro-permanent magnetic gripper with a pa…
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
Demand for fast and economical parcel deliveries in urban environments has risen considerably in recent years. A framework envisions efficient last-mile delivery in urban environments by leveraging a network of ride-sharing vehicles, where Unmanned Aerial Systems (UASs) drop packages on said vehicles, which then cover the majority of the distance before final aerial delivery. Notably, we consider the problem of planning a rendezvous path for the UAS to reach a human driver, who may choose between N possible paths and has uncertain behavior, while meeting strict safety constraints. The long pla…
The logistics of transporting a package from a storage facility to the consumer's front door usually employs highly specialized robots often times splitting sub-tasks up to different systems, e.g., manipulator arms to sort and wheeled vehicles to deliver. More recent endeavors attempt to have a unified approach with legged and humanoid robots. These solutions, however, occupy large amounts of space thus reducing the number of packages that can fit into a delivery vehicle. As a result, these bulky robotic systems often reduce the potential for scalability and task parallelization. In this paper…
LogisticsVLN: Vision-Language Navigation For Low-Altitude Terminal Delivery Based on Agentic UAVs
School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）；State Key Laboratory of Multimodal Artificial Intelligence Systems, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所多模态人工智能系统国家重点实验室）；Department of Engineering Science, Faculty of Innovation Engineering, Macau University of Science and Technology（澳门科技大学创新工程学院工程科学系）；China Ship Research and Development Academy（中国船舶科研 Academy）；Obuda University（奥布达大学）；State Key Laboratory for Management and Control of Complex Systems, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院复杂系统管理与控制国家重点实验室）
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich (ETH Zürich)（苏黎世联邦理工学院）
Flying manipulators are aerial drones with attached rigid-bodied robotic arms and belong to the latest and most actively developed research areas in robotics. The rigid nature of these arms often lack compliance, flexibility, and smoothness in movement. This work proposes to use a soft-bodied robotic arm attached to an omnidirectional micro aerial vehicle (OMAV) to leverage the compliant and flexible behavior of the arm, while remaining maneuverable and dynamic thanks to the omnidirectional drone as the floating base. The unification of the arm with the drone poses challenges in the modeling a…
Trajectory Optimization for UAV-Based Medical Delivery with Temporal Logic Constraints and Convex Feasible Set Collision Avoidance
State Key Laboratory of Multimodal Artificial Intelligence Systems（多模态人工智能系统国家重点实验室）；Vanke School of Public Health（万科公共卫生学院）；School of Automation（自动化学院）
Planning a time-optimal trajectory for aerial robots is critical in many drone applications, such as rescue missions and package delivery, which have been widely researched in recent years. However, it still involves several challenges, particularly when it comes to incorporating special task requirements into the planning as well as the aerial robot's dynamics. In this work, we study a case where an aerial manipulator shall hand over a parcel from a moving mobile robot in a time-optimal manner. Rather than setting up the approach trajectory manually, which makes it difficult to determine the …
Multilinked aerial robot is one of the state-of-the-art works in aerial robotics, which demonstrates the deformability benefiting both maneuvering and manipulation. However, the performance in outdoor physical world has not yet been evaluated because of the weakness in the controllability and the lack of the state estimation for autonomous flight. Thus we adopt tilting propellers to enhance the controllability. The related design, modeling and control method are developed in this work to enable the stable hovering and deformation. Furthermore, the state estimation which involves the time synch…
Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)（挪威科技大学（NTNU））；Voliro AG（Voliro公司）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）
This paper presents a review of the design and application of model predictive control strategies for Micro Aerial Vehicles and specifically multirotor configurations such as quadrotors. The diverse set of works in the domain is organized based on the control law being optimized over linear or nonlinear dynamics, the integration of state and input constraints, possible fault-tolerant design, if reinforcement learning methods have been utilized and if the controller refers to free-flight or other tasks such as physical interaction or load transportation. A selected set of comparison results are…
