During the stay in TU Delft, I will work along with the Delft Center for Systems and Control (DCSC) in the modelling
and testing of a cooperation paradigm for a team formed by unmanned ground vehicles and unmanned aerial vehicles.
The objective is to design a fully automated and efficient package delivery system.
Amazon is one of the greatest e-commerce companies in the world, mainly well-known because of its short time and reliable deliveries. Nevertheless, e-commerce is becoming than trendy activity that even Amazon requires to update its resources to meet the high demand of buying and selling products and so, be competitive with the rest of e-commerce companies. This leads to Amazon to keep researching for novel solutions that hold it at the top of e-commerce companies ranking. In this way, the Exploration Problem above mentioned is easily adaptable to build a future Amazon’s package delivery system where a UGV-UAV multi-robot system cooperates to deliver the packages around the world.
In the Package Delivery domain, the problem is to deliver a set of packages in a large-scale area, such as a city, i.e., Madrid. Let’s suppose that Madrid has its own warehouse from where the multi-robot team starts and finishes their daily deliveries. Let’s suppose that the UGV carries a set of UAVs and a set of packages for delivering. Also, let’s suppose the constraints denoted by the Exploration Problem.
Then, as a daily routine, the objective is to find a cooperative routing for the UGV-UAV multi-robot system to allow the UAVs to deliver every package while trying to minimize the delivery time. Following the cooperative approach, the UGV is a moving charging station which carries the UAVs through strategic central nodes from where the UAVs start and end their deliveries. Each central node is linked to a sub-set of deliveries. On each sub-set, the UAVs plan a route considering flying back to the UGV to recharge its battery to avoid run out of energy, then, it performs recharging in the UGV.
This autonomous delivery system aims to maximize the number of parallel deliveries through the minimizing of the distance travelled by the UGV-UAV multi-robot system.