Cooperative system and method for precise autonomous delivery

Abstract

A system for delivery of payload at a precise location by autonomous delivery vehicle. A machine-readable unique identifier is laid at a place where a user wants delivery of an item. User opens a precise delivery app on smartphone, activates the scanner and standing near the unique identifier scans it. Precise delivery app reads the unique identity of the unique identifier and collects the geophysical location of the smartphone. Third party system feeds this information of the target unique identifier to the autonomous vehicle. The autonomous delivery vehicle includes a first prior art navigator and a second scanner navigator. The autonomous vehicle determines its route to the approximate location of the target unique identifier with the help of the first prior art navigator and the second scanner navigator scans every unique identifier that may be present around that location and guides the autonomous vehicle to the target unique identifier.

Description

FIELD OF THE INVENTION[0001]The present invention in general is related to autonomous delivery systems and methods. More specifically, the present invention is related to the use of inexpensive cooperative navigation systems and methods for delivery of packages via unmanned aerial vehicles at a precise desired delivery location.BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION[0002]Online or remote shopping has grown immensely over the past decade. Remote shopping offers many benefits including allowing customers to shop from literally anywhere in the world, eliminating the costs associated of having to ship, store, and sell items from traditional retail store locations, and allowing manufacturers and distributors to reach a larger target market at a lower cost and higher margin than by traditional retail locations.[0003]However, despite these advantages, remote shopping has some drawbacks and, among such drawbacks, the lag time between purchasing an item and having it delivered is a major one. Most of t...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0008]It is, therefore, an object of the present invention to provide a system and method for high accuracy delivery of payloads at desired locations by autonomous delivery vehicles through inexpensive and easy to implement navigation system.

[0009]Another object of the present invention is to provide a system and method for delivering payloads to a specific location with high accuracy by cooperation between the payload delivery system and the delivery location.

[0011]Still another object of the present invention is to provide a system and method for precise delivery of payloads at a target landing zone wherein the target landing zone requires no maintenance.

[0012]A further object of the present invention is to provide a central database to store GPS location, unique identity of landing zone and unique user code for facilitating fast and easy communication of information for precise delivery of payloads to a specific location.

[0014]Yet another object of the present invention is to provide a system and method for precise delivery of payloads at a target landing zone as desired by a customer among a plurality of landing zones associated with other customers and located in close proximity to the target landing zone.

[0020]The system and method of the present invention offers an inexpensive solution for a highly accurate autonomous delivery of a payload at locations desired by a user and the system and method can be adopted for implementation at a large scale commercial use.

Problems solved by technology

However, despite these advantages, remote shopping has some drawbacks and, among such drawbacks, the lag time between purchasing an item and having it delivered is a major one.

Most of the goods purchased by remote shopping need to be delivered to the users at home or at business place and this can take days or longer.

However, this can be very costly and inefficient as it requires a large number of individuals on call to go out and deliver items as they are purchased.

However, despite its many advantages, one of the potential problems of using drones to deliver packages is its failure to deliver at a customer controlled address.

In certain situations, a specific desired receiving area maybe adjacent to other potential receiving areas, perhaps separated by less than a meter, and drones or other autonomous vehicles may fail to deliver packages accurately at such delivery addresses.

The problem with the present day Global Positioning System (GPS) based drone delivery system is that commercially used GPS systems can neither offer the high degree of accuracy that would be required for precise landing of a drone at a delivery address, nor does it provide differentiation between parties at the same address, nor does it provide feedback to the deliverer.

Likewise the current coordinate-based delivery systems cannot account for safety and obstruction issues.

On the other hand, the high accuracy navigation systems are very expensive, consume a lot of power and size and, thus, are a hurdle in implementing those systems in commercial utilization of autonomous package delivery system.

But such systems need electric power and proper maintenance.

These indicators consume high amount of electricity and are often accompanied by dedicated generators.

Hence, this won't be appropriate for a consumer who does not want to actively maintain his landing zone, or supply it with power.

Some landing zone indicators use lasers which also consume much power.

This also won't be appropriate for consumers who do not want to actively maintain their landing zone, or supply it with power.

Images