Drones as a Solution to Last-Mile Delivery Inefficiencies

In logistics, the last mile delivery from the warehouse to the customer is the least efficient stage. Drones are a leading solution to this issue and could solve it permanently.

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Inspiration

The idea for the drone was similar to a project that one of our team members had done in the past. While brainstorming about solutions for the sustainability theme and considering the components available to us, we settled on building the drone during this hackathon.

What it does

Drones have been used for more efficient delivery for several years now, and they have been under development for decades before that. Our project is not new in that sense. What we did recognize, however, is that intelligent drones are rarely affordable, and only drones with the bare minimum electronics cost under $30. Our goal was to develop a low-cost drone that can support more advanced capabilities (in the future, with further development), like object detection and, with higher quality motors and larger size, lightweight package delivery. According to our brief market research, the biggest impediment to widespread drone delivery systems is the cost to develop and build them. Therefore, demonstrating that drones can be quickly designed using the newest, lowest-cost technology available to us, is extremely important for companies to continue to invest in these more efficient delivery methods.

How we built it

  • Solidworks and some advanced CAD design techniques to design the chassis and propellers
  • 3D printers for design
  • MPlab X for programming the PIC32MX
  • PIC C libraries
  • lots of reading datasheets!
  • working with Georgia Tech's soldering equipment and protoboards to develop electronic devices

Challenges we ran into

The lack of accessibility to certain resources that we thought we would be able to use, such as the PCB mills, led to some issues. After we had already lost a significant amount of time designing a PCB that we were unable to produce, we had to make our own from scratch. More specifically, we had to create a board with the small protoboard that was provided. Unfortunately, we ran into some minor, unforeseen connection issues with the protoboard that we could not fix because the makerspace was already closed (and we did not have access to a soldering iron). This meant that we were unable to finish configuring the circuit hardware, so we could not test any of our code or demonstrate what tangible progress we had made. We also ended up having to work as a team of three instead of four after one of our teammates left early because he was not feeling well. He did not choose to continue working with us online.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were glad that we were able to efficiently build a prototype and get it working quickly. We did not get far enough in the project to look back on much, but we are proud of the skills that learned and applied during the event!

What we learned

  • Better soldering techniques
  • Solidworks & some advanced CAD design techniques
  • PIC C libraries/ microcontroller programming
  • 3D printing
  • Microelectronics/hardware

What's next for Drones as a Solution to Last-Mile Delivery Inefficiencies

Because the majority of our team is from Clemson, we hope to continue working on the drone and finish it in the near future. A long-term idea is to implement object detection using an IR camera and a low-cost FPGA, similar to a real delivery drone, but this would be time-consuming and involve more learning.

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