Control of a Novel Parcel Delivery System Consisting of a UAV and a Public Train A parcel delivery system with a unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and a public train is presented, where the train moves naturally as it is and the UAV can depart the train to deliver parcels. The UAV can travel with the train and replace its battery on the roof. An optimization problem is formulated to minimize the total delivery time and two algorithms are proposed. The exact algorithm gives the optimal schedule, but it is not scalable. The developed suboptimal algorithm is computationally efficient and achieves close performance to that of the exact algorithm. Realistic simulations are conducted to evaluate the proposed algorithms and they are compared with existing schemes.

When Drones Take Public Transport: Towards Low Cost and Large Range Parcel Delivery* Though drones have become a promising tool for parcel delivery, due to the limited capacity of the onboard battery, their flight range is constrained. To enlarge the coverage range, the paper proposes a novel method, in which a parcel delivery drone can take a public transportation vehicle and travel on its roof. We investigate how to make use of the public transportation network to route the drone between the depot and a customer. Considering the complexity of the public transportation network, its randomness and timedependency, instead of offline planning a global optimal path, an adaptive algorithm is developed. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate how the proposed approach works.