Drone-Truck Cooperated Delivery Under Time Varying Dynamics

Abstract

Rapid technological developments in autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (or drones) could soon lead to their large-scale implementation in the last-mile delivery of products. However, drones have a number of problems such as limited energy budget, limited carrying capacity, etc. On the other hand, trucks have a larger carrying capacity, but they cannot reach all the places easily. Intriguingly, last-mile delivery cooperation between drones and trucks can synergistically improve delivery efficiency. In this paper, we present a drone-truck co-operated delivery framework under time-varying dynamics. Our framework minimizes the total delivery time while considering low energy consumption as the secondary objective. The empirical results support our claim and show that our algorithm can help to complete the deliveries time efficiently and saves energy.