Safe Return Home Solution Using a Smart Drone Scout

The women’s safe return home service is short on operating hours and manpower. To address this social issue, this paper proposes an unmanned solution using a smart drone. When a user calls this system, it generates an initial safe path based on data from electronic tag wearers (i.e., obstacles) and map information. As the obstacles move, the safe path is re-planned to avoid them. The smart drone tracks and monitors the users returning home along the planned safe path at a certain distance and angle in real time. Since the raw GPS data from the user’s app are unreliable, these are corrected to map-matching points for the drone to determine the points to track. Moreover, the smart drone identifies corners to avoid losing the monitored field of view at corners and adjusts its tracking accordingly. Flight test results validate the overall functionality and performance of the proposed solution, i.e., the proposed system improves user safety by effectively minimizing contact with electronic tag wearers while maintaining a certain distance and angle from the user by controlling the direction and speed of the drone.