An Autonomous Vehicle for Parcel Delivery in Urban Areas

Abstract

The flexible and individualized transportation of goods is a central task of today's e-economy. In urban and highly populated areas autonomous electric vehicles are a promising solution for this task while simultaneously addressing ecological issues. While in indoor environments transport robots are well adopted, autonomous transport vehicles are hardly seen outdoors. In this paper, we aim at this gap and adapt and transfer concepts usually used in robotics to autonomous vehicles for an outdoor environment. We present an autonomous vehicle that is able to safely navigate in urban environments while able to deliver parcels efficiently. In particular, we will discuss a scalable and robust mapping and navigation process that forms the basis for the capabilities of the delivery vehicle. Moreover, we show preliminary results of a deployment of the system in two urban scenarios.