Planning UAV Trajectory for Multi-Commodity Package Pickup and Delivery

The use of UAVs for logistics services has become a highly regarded application in recent years. This paper studies the package pickup and delivery problem with multi-commodity and multi-visits. Due to the limited load, the UAV has to operate within the load limit when performing package delivery services. In addition, we allow the UAV to visit a location multiple times during the mission. Our objective is to minimize the total flying distance of the UAV. Since the problem is NP-hard, we propose a two-phase heuristic algorithm to solve this problem. First, the trajectory of the UAV to pick up or deliver packages is constructed using a greedy algorithm. Second, we optimize the previously built trajectory to obtain a shorter flying distance for the UAV. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the baselines regarding total flight distance and execution time.