Review of Navigation Methods for UAV-Based Parcel Delivery

This paper presents a comprehensive review of state-of-the-art navigation methods available for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) used in parcel delivery. Particularly, the paper focuses on state-of-the-art sensor configurations, multi-sensor data fusion architectures, and their performance when employed for UAV navigation. Additionally, this paper presents the associated safety regulations for UAV navigation currently imposed by regulatory bodies in US and Canada. The existing navigation solutions sometimes produce degenerative results due to GPS loss, multipath signals, spoofing events, and other sensor degradation scenarios. Therefore, this article investigates the suitability of integrating visual lidar odometry and mapping (VLOAM) with GPS to overcome the limitations of existing navigation solutions. A comparative study of the multi-sensory combined solutions is presented with numerical simulations, validating the regulatory compliance of VLOAM and GPS integrated system under common GPS failure cases.