Current approaches to last-mile urban delivery are expensive, inefficient and adversely impact quality-of-life. While UAVs are posited to revolutionise the sector, this proposition is threatened by their deterioration in efficiency over extended distances. This work proposed to mitigate these issues through the use of public-transport as mobile UAV charging- points. Through multi-objective optimal routing, applied to a case-study of e-commerce deliveries integrated with London bus-networks, the concept was shown to reduce the energy-consumption of existing commercial drones by 52%.

For more information and results, see the analysis GitHub, or get in touch.