Nonstop Handover of Parcel to Airborne UAV Based on Highspeed Visual Object Tracking 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 nonstop handover of a parcel to an airborne UAV. For the handover task, we developed a novel tracking system with highspeed, multicamera vision using cameras with different frame rates. Through sensor fusion, the proposed system overcomes the problem associated with tracking far away objects by using highspeed 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.

Control of a Novel Parcel Delivery System Consisting of a UAV and a Public Train A parcel delivery system with a unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and a public train is presented, where the train moves naturally as it is and the UAV can depart the train to deliver parcels. The UAV can travel with the train and replace its battery on the roof. An optimization problem is formulated to minimize the total delivery time and two algorithms are proposed. The exact algorithm gives the optimal schedule, but it is not scalable. The developed suboptimal algorithm is computationally efficient and achieves close performance to that of the exact algorithm. Realistic simulations are conducted to evaluate the proposed algorithms and they are compared with existing schemes.