Autonomous Drone Delivery to Your Door and Yard

TL;DR

This paper introduces an autonomous drone delivery system that uses deep learning and visual cues to navigate and deliver packages to specified locations around a house without external markers, improving speed and flexibility.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel visual navigation system combining semantic segmentation and routing strategies for autonomous drone delivery without external markers.

Findings

Drones delivered packages to front doors and other locations successfully.

The system was 161% faster than frontier exploration strategies in tests.

Extensive simulation validated the effectiveness of the approach.

Abstract

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 provided to human couriers. First, we propose a semantic image segmentation-based descending location estimator that enables the drone to find a safe spot around the house at which it can descend from higher altitudes. Following this, we propose a strategy for visually routing the drone from the descent location to a specific site at which it is to deliver the package, such as the front door. We extensively evaluate this approach in a simulated environment and demonstrate that with our system, a delivery drone can deliver a package to the front door and also to other specified locations around a house. Relative to a frontier exploration-based strategy, drones using the proposed system found and reached the front doors of the 20 test houses 161% faster.