Delivery Time Minimization for Cargo UAV With Payload and Endurance Restriction

With the rapid development of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology, the low-altitude economy has gradually become a new economic growth driver. As an important part of the low-altitude economy, cargo UAVs have attracted wide attention due to their flexibility and efficiency. In the UAV delivery system, improving the efficiency of cargo delivery is a problem to be solved. However, due to the power and battery energy, the cargo weight and flight time of the cargo UAV in a single flight are limited. In addition, to ensure safety and reliability, the UAV must maintain a better communication channel with the base station (BS). To address this challenge, we maximize the cargo delivery efficiency by minimizing the UAV’s total delivery time. Firstly, we stipulate that the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) the UAV receives at any position must be greater than a threshold to guarantee the quality of the communication channel. We optimize the UAV’s trajectory using the A<sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">∗</sup> algorithm to achieve this purpose. Next, we optimize the cargo delivery sequence of the UAV with limited payload and endurance by the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm, so as to minimize the total delivery time of the UAV. Numerical results show that the proposed algorithm can improve the performance of UAV cargo delivery efficiency by about 4%-22% compared with the benchmark algorithm.