Non-stop Handover of Parcel to Airborne UAV Based on High-speed Visual Object Tracking

Abstract

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 highspeed, 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 highspeed object tracking (1000 fps) and distant object tracking.