How do I make lerp parameter a little smoother? (drone following player)

I have a drone that follows around my character. Horizontally, it looks nice and smooth, and the animations don't look jumpy. However, when I move vertically, the drone's animations look a little rough. Not enough to be a huge deal, but enough to notice. Here is the code I'm using to make it follow my player character. Am I maybe missing something that would work here?

I'm looking for a way to make it stop a little farther from my character when I stop too, instead of moving into the middle of the character model. Let me know if there's a way to do this. Thanks!

And by the way, when using lerp you need to use delta-time. Instead of 0.005 in the last parameter, it should be 0.3*dt. Otherwise the game will run differently on different frame rates.

I'd go directly with the mathematically correct way of

lerp(a, b, 1 - f ^ dt)