Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in Logistics: Efficiency Gains and Communication Performance of Hybrid Combinations of Ground and Aerial Vehicles

Abstract

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have drastically gained popularity in various Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) applications to improve the safety and efficiency of transportation systems. In this context, the combination of ground vehicles, such as delivery trucks, with drones to assist in the lastmile pick-up and delivery of the parcels has been recently proposed. While aerial vehicles promise increased efficiency based on flexible routes and parallelized operation, highly reliable wireless communication is also required for the control and coordination of potentially many drones acting in a self-organized way. In this paper, we analyze the improvements procured by drone usage in parcel delivery compared to traditional delivery and propose a simulation framework to further quantify the efficiency gains of the parcel delivery logistics and to analyze the performance of different wireless communications options. To this end, we consider a heterogeneous vehicle routing problem with various constraints. We consider two approaches regarding the dispatching and recovery of drones and evaluate their benefits as opposed to parcel delivery with a classic truck only. Furthermore, we compare two networking technologies for enabling coordination of the self-organizing teams of drones with a realistically modeled environment: one approach relying on base station oriented Long Term Evolution (LTE) vs. a more decentralized Cellular Vehicleto-Everything (C-V2X) solution. The results show time savings of nearly 80% can be achieved through drone usage and that the negative impact of urban shadowing on network communications in the base station oriented LTE approach can be compensated by leveraging decentralized C-V2X communications.

On the Integration of Enabling Wireless Technologies and Sensor Fusion for Next-Generation Connected and Autonomous Vehicles

“…Another key application for autonomous UAVs is for logistical purposes [191]. [192] presents a UAV-based infrastructure to replace the traditional cloud-computingbased infrastructure for computing and storage facilities to be available near CAVs.Owing to the widespread fame of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), tremendous amounts of information will be shared between edge devices and UAVs.…”

Flying Robots for Safe and Efficient Parcel Delivery Within the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…LIghtweight ICT-centric Mobility Simulation (LIMoSim) [15] applies a shared codebase approach, thus avoiding Inter-Process Communications (IPC) overhead, to couple ns-3 with the LIMoSim mobility kernel supporting hybrid combinations of ground and aerial vehicles. A dedicated extension was provided in [3] to bring native simulation support of UAV-aided parcel delivery mobility and communications.…”

“…The reach is limited as well, due to its battery capacity. Combining these two vehicle types in a hybrid delivery fleet brings performance benefits when applying a joint path planning of aerial-and ground-based vehicles [3]. An optimal path can be found by solving the resulting hybrid TSP with drones.…”

“…The integration of small-scale UAVs into future ITS [1] has been an emerging topic in recent years. Due to the unique mobility potential of these airborne vehicles, significant efficiency improvements in applications such as aerial traffic monitoring [2] and parcel delivery [3] have been anticipated. Despite promising initial case studies, the existing approaches have been dominated by academic analyses.…”

PARRoT: Predictive Ad-hoc Routing Fueled by Reinforcement Learning and Trajectory Knowledge

“…Collaborating autonomous drones that coordinate their actions using Flying Ad-hoc Networks (FANETs) offer the potential to efficiently perform important disaster relief tasks -e.g., remote sensing and network provisioning -without risking the lives of human helpers [1]. A closely related emerging research field is the integration of small-scale UAVs into future ITSs [2] for applications such as aerial traffic monitoring [3] and UAV-aided near field delivery [4]. While the latter concept has been initially proposed for reducing the delivery time in inner cities, its inherent avoidance of direct human-to-human interaction also makes it a promising candidate for increasing the delivery safety during the COVID-19 pandemic [5].…”