Last-Centimeter Personal Drone Delivery: Field Deployment and User Interaction

Abstract

Drones are rapidly becoming an affordable and often faster solution for parcel delivery than terrestrial vehicles. Existing transportation drones and software infrastructures are mostly designed by logistics companies for trained users and dedicated infrastructure, and are to be used for either long range (<150 km) or last-mile delivery (<20 km). This letter presents Dronistics, an integrated software and hardware system for last-centimeter (<5 km) person-to-person delivery using cargo drones. The system is conceived to be intuitive and intrinsically safe to enable short-distance deliveries between inexperienced users. Dronistics is composed of a safe foldable drone (PackDrone) and a web application software to intuitively control and track the drone in real time. In order to assess Dronistics' user acceptance, we conducted 150 deliveries over one month on the EPFL campus in Switzerland. Here we describe the results of these tests by analyzing flight statistics, environmental conditions, and user reactions. Moreover, we also describe technical problems that occurred during flight tests and solutions that could prevent them. Index Terms-Aerial systems, applications, intelligent transportation systems, unmanned aerial vehicles. I. INTRODUCTION R ECENT years have witnessed an exponential rise in interest in delivery drones, and mainly multicopters, due to their capability to effectively overcome obstacles or traffic jams, to rapidly reach remote locations, and to take off and land in cluttered environments. Therefore, logistics companies have started to explore the possibility of using aerial delivery as a faster and more cost-effective alternative to terrestrial transportation [1], [2]. Examples include Amazon.com's tests of product deliveries to homes directly from warehouses in the United Kingdom [3], DHL's deliveries of emergency medical supplies using its Parcelcopter [4], Alphabet's burrito deliveries to Australian homes with its Project Wing drones [5], Swiss Post's experiments with transportation of lab samples between hospitals in Lugano, Switzerland [6], and Zipline's transportation of blood from central storehouses to remote hospitals in Africa [7]. All these aerial delivery services are developed for operation by trained employees of logistics companies for

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“…Goods reception solutions includes articles focusing on self-service technologies [4,30], collection and delivery points [31,32], unattended home deliveries [33], or the comparison of different solutions [34][35][36]. Innovative vehicle solutions refers to articles focusing on electric vehicles [37,38], bicycles [39], tricycles [40], drones [41], and comparison of different vehicle solutions [42,43]. Emerging business models incorporate articles focusing on business models emerging for last mile logistics, especially crowd logistics [44][45][46], and the mix of different business models [47].…”

PinpointFly: An Egocentric Position-control Drone Interface using Mobile AR

“…For example, drone display [21] has huge potential for indoor applications such as physical props [17,33], 3D-content representation [5,28], or mid-air displays [61,72,77]. Inspection [49] and delivery applications [35,41] are increasingly attracting attention. These applications are also more challenging than simple FPV-based videography (e.g., [37,43]) because the pilots require stronger spatial awareness of the fying drone beyond the FPV from the drone camera, for example, where the drone is, where the next target is, and in which direction the drone now heads in relation to the entire inspection area.…”

Mobile-Controlled UAVs for Audio Delivery Service and Payload Tracking Solution

“…In the modern UAV technology-saturated world, it has tremendous applications in most of the sectors in our daily life which are inclusive of medicines, vaccines, blood samples, defibrillators, payloads and food delivery etc. These UAV based delivery services are either done due to busyness, emergency, traffic congestion and severe weather difficulty in access through road transportation [5], [19], [20]. [48], [49] has been introduced for Asphyxia patients.…”

“…Several delivery companies including Amazon. DHL have adopted UAV as the logistic tool for providing payload delivery service [5], [19], [20].…”