Integration of UAVs and Public Transportation Vehicles for Parcel Delivery
Hailong Huang PhD, Andrey V. Savkin, Chao Huang PhD · 2022
In this chapter, we discuss applications of unmanned aerial vehicles ( UAVs ) in the last-mile parcel delivery. UAVs have been considered as a promising tool for the future logistics industry by many companies thanks to the reduced cost and increased mobility. However, one barrier is the limited flight time due to the limitation of the onboard battery, which has not been explicitly considered yet in the previous chapters. This chapter presents the recent research work on exploiting public transportation vehicles to assist UAV delivery. Particular attention is paid to the path planning problem when a UAV can travel with public transportation vehicles, and several algorithms are presented to deal with the considered problem in different situations.