Extending Delivery Range and Decelerating Battery Aging of Logistics UAVs using Public Buses

The battery-powered Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) is a promising alternative to traditional logistics trucks. Using UAVs can achieve much more speedy, cost-effective, and environment-friendly delivery on an urban scale. However, UAVs suffer from insufficient delivery range and battery aging. This paper presents an innovative logistics UAV scheduling framework using public buses, in which logistics UAVs Land and Recharge its battery on Buses (ULRB) to extend its delivery range and decelerate its fading battery capacity. This work correlates physical layer parameters such as the energy consumption rate, the parcels weight, UAV velocity, the battery temperature to the UAVs path planning, the battery discharging, and the capacity fading models. Specifically, the ULRB framework consists of a single-UAV scheduling module and a multi-UAV dispatching module. In the single-UAV module, a Markov-based algorithm is utilized to plan the UAVs flying path to land and dynamically get recharged on the bus. The latter module optimized the delivery progress in a multi-UAV, multi-parcel, and multi-bus scenario. Finally, using a large-scale real-world bus trajectory dataset, extensive evaluations are conducted to verify ULRB. The results show that ULRB can extend the UAVs delivery range by 5.54 and decelerate the battery aging by 3.26 on average.