Title: The Urban Last Mile Problem: Autonomous Drone Delivery to Your Balcony,
Abstract: Drone delivery has been a hot topic in the industry in the past few years.
However, existing approaches either focus on rural areas or rely on centralized
drop-off locations from where the last mile delivery is performed. In this
paper we tackle the problem of autonomous last mile delivery in urban
environments using an off-the-shelf drone. We build a prototype system that is
able to fly to the approximate delivery location using GPS and then find the
exact drop-off location using visual navigation. The drop-off location could,
e.g., be on a balcony or porch, and simply needs to be indicated by a visual
marker on the wall or window. We test our system components in simulated
environments, including the visual navigation and collision avoidance. Finally,
we deploy our drone in a real-world environment and show how it can find the
drop-off point on a balcony. To stimulate future research in this topic we open
source our code.