High speed supply station for UAV delivery system

Summary

• Researched at http://ishikawa-vision.org/fusion/UAVdelivery/index-e.html

Although research on physical distribution using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has seen increasingly significant interest, the task of automatically loading a parcel onto a UAV has not been researched adequately. In this study, to design an automatic UAV delivery system, we achieved the task of non-stop handover of a parcel to an airborne UAV. For the handover task, we developed a novel tracking system with high-speed, multi-camera vision using cameras with different frame rates. Through sensor fusion, the proposed system overcomes the problem associated with tracking far away objects by using high-speed cameras with short exposure times. The proposed system demonstrates that it is feasible to combine both high-speed object tracking (1000 fps) and distant object tracking.

• Concept of non-stop handover of a parcel to an airborne UAV

• Experiment

Reference

• Satoshi Tanaka, Taku Senoo, and Masatoshi Ishikawa: Non-Stop Handover of Parcel to Airborne UAV Based on High-Speed Visual Object Tracking, 2019 19th International Conference on Advanced Robotics (ICAR) (Belo Horizonte, 2019.12.03), Proceedings, pp. 414-419.
• Satoshi Tanaka, Taku Senoo, and Masatoshi Ishikawa: High-speed UAV Delivery System with Non-Stop Parcel Handover Using High-speed Visual Control, 2019 IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Conference (ITSC19) (Auckland, 2019.10.30), Proceedings, pp. 4449-4455.

Media

• “As Drone Deliveries Become a Reality, One Company is Creating a Way For Drones to Automatically Grab a Package Without Slowing Down” 2020.09.08
• IEEE Spectrum “High-Speed Robot Arm Hands Off Package to Delivery Drone” 2020.05.22
• “High-Speed Robot Arm Hands Off Package to Delivery Drone” 2020.05.21