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A Leader-Follower Control System for a Package-Delivery Drone

Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: This paper proposes a control system to guide drones in delivering packages autonomously. The objective is to guide the quadrotor to take off from a ground vehicle, go to the delivery point, return to the ground vehicle, and land on it. The drone should disregard the ground vehicle as its leader when flying toward the delivery point and resume its leadership after delivering the parcel. To ensure this, the leader-follower formation control paradigm is adopted, allowing controlling the follower to track the leader's movement as a reference trajectory. To fully accomplish the delivery task, the delivery drone will follow two leaders at two different moments: the delivery point in the delivery step and the ground vehicle when returning to it. The delivery drone should also avoid obstacles, such as buildings and trees, to which the well-known potential field theory is adopted, thus completing the controller design. Results of an experiment on a lab scale are presented and discussed, which validates the proposed control system. Consequently, the correctness of the underlying hypothesis that the leader-follower control paradigm is a feasible solution to control a delivery drone in accomplishing package delivery is confirmed. This is the main contribution of the study. Moreover, a possible generalization of the proposed control system for a set of delivery drones is outlined.
Source: IEEE Access
DOI: 10.1109/access.2025.3555031
Language: English
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $2,075
OpenAlex ID: W4408859191
FWCI: 2.185
Cites: 39
Cited by: 5
Related to: 10