Autonomous Delivery Drone

The problem of increasing population and pollution demands solutions that are environment friendly while making the job easier and faster. A smart, secure and economical drone delivery service that is environment friendly, multi-purpose and aptly energy efficient as compared to the current delivery

Project Title

Autonomous Delivery Drone

Project Area of Specialization

Robotics

Project Summary

The problem of increasing population and pollution demands solutions that are environment friendly while making the job easier and faster. A smart, secure and economical drone delivery service that is environment friendly, multi-purpose and aptly energy efficient as compared to the current delivery vehicles is a very cogent solution to this problem. The goal is to automate and expedite the process of delivering small items all the while cutting down on fuel consumption and the carbon emissions significantly. It can also be used to deliver medical equipment at an exceedingly fast rate to an emergency site without disrupting the traffic while sparing more medical staff for major situations. A UAV with an on-board camera and a companion computer will be able to detect objects and help the drone reach its destination, coordinated by GPS, safely and swiftly while securely delivering the package as it reaches a certain height. The scope of this project is limited to light weight objects as of now, of course with far reaching possibilities of expansion as the hardware is upgraded.

Project Objectives

• The main objective for this project is to provide instant delivery of small packages that would otherwise take days and weeks to get delivered. These products can also include lifesaving medicines that are needed to be delivered urgently.
• Another motivation for this project was to minimize the use of automobiles for package delivery as they contribute to the added air pollution due to their CO2 emission. The air quality of Pakistan is perilous in accordance with WHOs guidelines, and we needed to concoct an idea that wouldn’t simply be useful to the public but to the climate also which is why we came up with the idea of making an environment friendly package delivery drone
• The drone is completely autonomous which means that it requires no human interaction from the beginning till the very end, a mechanism this advanced is very unconventional in Pakistan and we wanted to do something that was out of the ordinary and would greatly benefit the consumer.

Project Implementation Method

Our drone is a quadcopter (It is the most stable and power efficient form) that we built using a ‘Pixhawk Flight Controller’ which controls our 4 DJI E300 920kv motors through 15A E300 ESCs (Electronic Speed Controllers). Powered by a Gensace 4000 mAh LiPo battery with a discharge rate of 45C. It has enough current discharge rate to power any powerful companion computer to expand the horizons of our drone’s capability. Pixhawk has an on-board IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit) with accelerometer, gyroscope and magnetometer to balance the UAV in the best possible way. The plan is to use a companion computer such as the Nvidia Jetson Nano, combined with a high speed stereo camera, ZED 2i in our case, to capture and process depth data, communicating with the main flight controller ‘Pixhawk’. This will allow our drone to intelligently detect and avoid obstacles. A stereo camera in this case will work just like two human eyes detecting RGBD (Red, Green, Blue, ‘Depth’) information. All of this communication happens through a protocol called ‘MAVLink’ using various software libraries and APIs, most of them using ‘Python Programming Language’

With the drone flying intelligently along any GPS route avoiding obstacles, it can pick any package up from one point and deliver it to another without any physical human interaction using an attached ‘Electromagnet’.

         

 

 

Benefits of the Project

The drone is more proficient in covering troublesome territories that are generally outlandish with traditional delivery techniques. The drone saves fuel costs and has low energy utilization. Since it is battery operated there is no carbon emission from the drone. It will help reduce the discharge of greenhouse gasses from the logistics industry, manage concerns identified with noise pollution and will not be a danger to wildlife which isn’t the case when we use conventional delivery methods. Moreover, ordering items through a courier is expensive, time-consuming and the means of transport used adds-in to the increasing traffic. An autonomous, low-powered drone can be environment-friendly and will be able to reach its destination at an unmatched speed.

Technical Details of Final Deliverable

Building a drone that is reasonably-priced and compact is not good enough. It must be able to detect and avoid obstacles to make it viable for the modern problems and for that we are using a lightweight and small sized frame powered using small, powerful yet energy efficient motors with safe and foldable rotors.

Main hardware of the drone consists of a Pixhawk controller running motors, ESCs and other mechanical parts of the drone. This main hardware is connected to a more powerful computer which is an ’Nvidia Jetson Nano’, used as a companion computer to run our obstacle detection algorithm. This algorithm takes depth imagery from our mounted stereo camera “Stereolabs’ ZED 2i” which is equipped with two very high resolution cameras (2k) capturing depth data just like the human eyes and processing them using on-board AI processors. We are feeding this data to our Algorithm running on Nvidia’s tiny yet powerful companion computer ‘Jetson Nano’ which then communicates using ROS (Robot OS) MAVLink (Communication Protocol) and various other technologies to send PWM signals to the pixhawk, giving our UAV a more powerful brain and eyes to navigate through the world.

Building a drone that is reasonably-priced and compact is not good enough. It must be able to detect and avoid obstacles to make it viable for the modern problems and for that we are using a lightweight and small sized frame powered using small, powerful yet energy efficient motors with safe and foldable rotors.

Main hardware of the drone consists of a Pixhawk controller running motors, ESCs and other mechanical parts of the drone. This main hardware is connected to a more powerful computer which is an ’Nvidia Jetson Nano’, used as a companion computer to run our obstacle detection algorithm. This algorithm takes depth imagery from our mounted stereo camera “Stereolabs’ ZED 2i” which is equipped with two very high resolution cameras (2k) capturing depth data just like the human eyes and processing them using on-board AI processors. We are feeding this data to our Algorithm running on Nvidia’s tiny yet powerful companion computer ‘Jetson Nano’ which then communicates using ROS (Robot OS) MAVLink (Communication Protocol) and various other technologies to send PWM signals to the pixhawk, giving our UAV a more powerful brain and eyes to navigate through the world.

Final Deliverable of the Project

HW/SW integrated system

Core Industry

Transportation

Other Industries

IT , Medical , Security

Core Technology

Robotics

Other Technologies

Artificial Intelligence(AI)

Sustainable Development Goals

Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure, Responsible Consumption and Production

Required Resources

If you need this project, please contact me on contact@adikhanofficial.com