An Air-Ground Cooperative Real-Time Delivery Scheme Based on Joint Scheduling

With the development of driverless technology, unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been widely used in the realm of commodity delivery. In the scenario with a high requirement for timeliness commodity delivery, the mobile unmanned retail mode has grabbed tremendous sights. However, the traditional retail mode solely focuses on presetting routes for delivery, but fails to deal with the real-time change of customers orders with the assistance of UAVs and UGVs. In this paper, we propose an air-ground cooperative real-time delivery scheme based on joint scheduling. Specifically, UGVs deliver commodities to customers based on spatial-temporal costs (e.g., delivery distance and order urgency). The UAV serves to replenish UGVs with commodity resources, achieving a balance between regional resource consumption and UAV resource replenishment based on joint scheduling. Finally, experimental results show our scheme outperforms other baseline schemes in terms of customers average waiting time, UGVs average delivery delay time, and UAV total flight distance.