Related papers: Drones-aided Asset Maintenance in Hospitals

Swarms of aerial drones have recently been considered for last-mile deliveries in urban logistics or automated construction. At the same time, collaborative transportation of payloads by multiple drones is another important area of recent…

We investigate the capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP) under a robotics context, where a vehicle with limited payload must complete delivery (or pickup) tasks to serve a set of geographically distributed customers with varying…

The pandemic by COVID-19 is causing a devastating effect on the health of global population. There are several efforts to prevent the spread of the virus. Among those efforts, cleaning and disinfecting public areas have become important…

Unmanned aerial vehicles or drones are becoming increasingly popular due to their low cost and high mobility. In this paper we address the routing and coordination of a drone-truck pairing where the drone travels to multiple locations to…

Unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, have the potential to significantly reduce the cost and time of making last-mile deliveries and responding to emergencies. Despite this potential, little work has gone into developing vehicle routing…

Joint parcel delivery by trucks and drones has enjoyed significant attention for some time, as the advantages of one delivery method offset the disadvantages of the other. This paper focuses on the vehicle routing problem with drones and…

One of the lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic is the importance of social distancing, even in challenging circumstances such as pre-hurricane evacuation. To explore the implications of integrating social distancing with evacuation…

The use of trucks and drones as a solution to address last-mile delivery challenges is a new and promising research direction explored in this paper. The variation of the problem where the drone can intercept the truck while in movement or…

Autonomous drone swarms deployed for surveillance, environmental monitoring, and infrastructure inspection must maintain reliable coverage of critical assets despite robot failures. This requires multicoverage: each asset must be observed…

The vehicle routing problem with drones (VRP-D) is to determine the optimal routes of trucks and drones such that the total operational cost is minimized in a scenario where the trucks work in tandem with the drones to deliver parcels to…

The COVID-19 pandemic has severely affected public health, healthcare systems, and daily life, especially amid resource shortages and limited workers. This crisis has underscored the urgent need for automation in hospital environments,…

Drones are currently seen as a viable way for improving the distribution of parcels in urban and rural environments, while working in coordination with traditional vehicles like trucks. In this paper we consider the parallel drone…

Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is an infectious disease caused by a newly discovered coronavirus. It is similar to influenza viruses and raises concerns through alarming levels of spread and severity resulting in an ongoing pandemic…

Autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) play a crucial role in transportation and service tasks at hospitals, contributing to enhanced efficiency and meeting medical demands. This paper investigates the optimization problem of scheduling strategies…

The capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP) involves distributing (identical) items from a depot to a set of demand locations, using a single capacitated vehicle. We study a generalization of this problem to the setting of multiple…

The rapid growth of e-commerce and the increasing demand for timely, cost-effective last-mile delivery have increased interest in collaborative logistics. This research introduces a novel collaborative synchronized multi-platform vehicle…

We study the problem of deploying a fleet of mobile robots to service tasks that arrive stochastically over time and at random locations in an environment. This is known as the Dynamic Vehicle Routing Problem (DVRP) and requires robots to…

Thanks to their fast delivery, reduced traffic restrictions, and low manpower need, drones have been increasingly deployed to deliver time-critical materials, such as medication, blood, and exam kits, in emergency situations. This paper…

Existing deep reinforcement learning (DRL) based methods for solving the capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP) intrinsically cope with homogeneous vehicle fleet, in which the fleet is assumed as repetitions of a single vehicle. Hence,…

The drone-based last-mile delivery is an emerging technology to deliver parcels using drones loaded on a truck. As more and more autonomous vehicles (AVs) will be available for delivery services, an opportunity is arising to fully automate…