Toward the deployment of an autonomous last-mile delivery robot in urban areas: the ona prototype platform

Nowadays, the skyrocketing last-mile freight transportation in urban areas is leading to very negative effects (e.g., pollution, noise or traffic congestion), which could be minimized by using autonomous electric vehicles. In this sense, this paper presents the first prototype of Ona, an autonomous last-mile delivery robot that, in contrast to existing platforms, has a medium-sized storage capacity with the capability of navigating in both street and pedestrian areas. Here, we describe the platform and position it with respect to other existing prototypes, providing its main Software modules and the first validation experiments, carried out in the Barcelona Robot Lab (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya); Esplugues de Llobregat (next to Barcelona); and Debrecen (Hungary), which are representative urban scenarios. In such validations, we focus our analysis on the key localization module, whose errors could cascade down the rest of the navigation pipeline (e.g., planning or control). Aside from robotic technical details, we also include the results of the technology acceptance by the public present in the Esplugues de Llobregat test, collected in situ through a survey.

This work has been partially supported by the European Union project LogiSmile (EIT-UM-2020-22140); by Hori- zon Europe under Grant agreement 101168042 [auTono- mous Robotic aId For increasing FIrst responDers efficiency TRIFFID]; by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under the projects Autonomous package delivery in urban areas (AUDEL) (TED2021-131759A-I00, funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by the” European Union NextGenerationEU/PRTR”) and Lifelong navigation learning using human-robot interaction (LENA) ( P I D 2 0 2 2 -14 2 0 3 9 N A - I 0 0 , f u n d e d b y M C I N / AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by “ERDF A way of mak- ing Europe”); by the Nou model de repartiment de paquets en superilles urbanes mitjançant una xarxa de vehicles elèc- trics autònoms (BotNet) project (23S06128-00), funded by the Ajuntament de Barcelona and Fundació la Caixa; and by the Consolidated Research Group RAIG (Mobile Robotics and Artificial Intelligence Group, 2021 SGR 00510) of the Departament de Recerca i Universitats de la Generalitat de Catalunya. We thank the Spanish Ministerio de Universi- dades, the European Union-Next Generation and the Universi- ty of Alicante for the financial support (Margarita Salas, MARSALAS21-08). This article has supplementary down- loadable material available at https://doi.org/10.1109/ MRA.2024.3487321, provided by the authors.

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