Design of a multiple package delivery system for a delivery UAV.

Abstract

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), commonly referred to as drones, have recently seen an increased level of interest as their potential use in same-day home delivery has been promoted and advocated for by large retailers and courier delivery companies. The deployment of a large fleet of UAVs or drones to perform deliveries of multiple packages within a given area of delivery, with each drone carrying a single package, has proven to be financially costly over time. Moreover, for deliveries within a small neighborhood, a single delivery drone makes multiple flights to and fro the distribution center e.g., a truck or van, warehouse, depot, each time carrying and delivering a single package. Single-package delivery drones incur high costs for last-mile delivery, longer time for delivery and lead to an increase in the traffic density of a given airspace. These drawbacks must be minimized to promote the feasibility of package/parcel deliveries by drones. We introduce a novel way to exploit drones in same-day home delivery designs: multiple package deliveries. We explore a technique that can be used to support multiple package/parcel deliveries by a single multirotor (rotary wing) drone on a single flight from the distribution center/depot/warehouse to different delivery locations within a given area or radius. We introduce the last-mile delivery problem in Section 1 and present the background of the project, the problem statement, its objectives, scope and significance/justification. In Section 2, we give a detailed literature review exploring the work that has already been done in relation to multiple package deliveries by drones, a detailed review of the best contributions to multiple package deliveries and a synthesis of new knowledge from them. In section 3, we present the methodology used in achieving the objectives of the project; where we start off with the concept of operations and conclude with the prototype design. In section 4, we present the results obtained from testing the system performance and give its detailed analysis and the system constraints. Lastly in section 5, we present the conclusion to the project and provide some of the recommendations for the use of this systems and some of the future improvements that can be added to the designed system.