Research on the Application of Low-Cost Aerial-Ground Delivery System Using UAV-UGV Joint

Abstract

The delivery service using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) collaboration has been a hot topic in the industry, and the low-cost UAV-UGV aerial-ground delivery system research has significant practical significance. This study proposes a low-cost aerial-ground delivery system for residential areas, based on UAV-UGV collaboration. The system uses a 2D SLAM enabled UGV for precise ground transportation and a quadrotor UAV equipped with SVO for high-altitude delivery of small and medium-sized packages. Both the UGV and the UAV are developed based on the Robot Operating System (ROS). This study comparing energy consumption and time taken under different operating modes and visual odometers respectively.. The delivery process is divided into three stages and a visual-maximization-based SVO fusion method is proposed for the UAV search in case of target loss. Experimental results show that the proposed system is effective, accurate, timely, and has high practical value.