Related papers: Drones-aided Asset Maintenance in Hospitals
Robots performing tasks in warehouses provide the first example of wide-spread adoption of autonomous vehicles in transportation and logistics. The efficiency of these operations, which can vary widely in practice, are a key factor in the…
The COVID-19 pandemic has recently exacerbated the fierce competition in the transportation businesses. The airline industry took one of the biggest hits as the closure of international borders forced aircraft operators to suspend their…
In disaster-stricken environments, it's vital to assess the damage quickly, analyse the stability of the environment, and allocate resources to the most vulnerable areas where victims might be present. These missions are difficult and…
We study the problem of containing spreading processes in arbitrary directed networks by distributing protection resources throughout the nodes of the network. We consider two types of protection resources are available: (i) Preventive…
Recent advancements in unmanned aerial vehicles, also known as drones, have motivated logistics to use drones for multiple operations. Collaboration between drones and trucks in a last-mile delivery system has numerous benefits and reduces…
We introduce a package service model where trucks as well as drones can deliver packages. Drones can travel on trucks or fly; but while flying, drones can only carry one package at a time and have to return to a truck to charge after each…
This paper addresses the problem of autonomous task allocation by a swarm of autonomous, interactive drones in large-scale, dynamic spatio-temporal environments. When each drone independently determines navigation, sensing, and recharging…
We are in the midst of a semi-autonomous era in urban transportation in which varying forms of vehicle autonomy are gradually being introduced. This phase of partial autonomy is anticipated by some to span a few decades due to various…
Efficiently solving a vehicle routing problem (VRP) in a practical runtime is a critical challenge for delivery management companies. This paper explores both a theoretical and experimental connection between the Capacitated Vehicle Routing…
Terrestrial robots, i.e., unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), and aerial robots, i.e., unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), operate in separate spaces. To exploit their complementary features (e.g., fields of views, communication links, computing…
Optimization problems with drones are widely studied in a variety of civilian tasks, mainly due to their ability to traverse rough terrains and to carry cameras and other sensors for surveillance tasks. The limited battery life of these…
In addition to its public health crisis, COVID-19 pandemic has led to the shutdown and closure of workplaces with an estimated total cost of more than $16 trillion. Given the long hours an average person spends in buildings and indoor…
We introduce the Vehicle Routing Problem with Resource-Constrained Pickup and Delivery (VRP-RPD), where vehicles transport finite identical resources to customer locations for autonomous processing before retrieval and redeployment. Unlike…
We consider the problem of mass transport cloaking using mobile robots. The robots move along a predefined curve that encloses a safe zone and carry sources that collectively counteract a chemical agent released in the environment. The goal…
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have attracted great interest in the last few years owing to their ability to cover large areas and access difficult and hazardous target zones, which is not the case of traditional systems relying on direct…
Multi-axle autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) are set to revolutionize the future of robotics in logistics. As the backbone of next-generation solutions, these robots face a critical challenge: managing and minimizing the swept volume during…
The idea of deploying electric vehicles and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), also known as drones, to perform "last-mile" delivery in logistics operations has attracted increasing attention in the past few years. In this paper, we propose…
We study a resource allocation problem for the cooperative aerial-ground vehicle routing application, in which multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) with limited battery capacity and multiple Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) that can also…
Objective: The status of human-robot collaboration for assembly applications is reviewed and key current challenges for the research community and practitioners are presented. Background: As the pandemic of COVID-19 started to surface the…
Once known to be used exclusively in military domain, unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) have stepped up to become a part of new logistic method in commercial sector called "last-mile delivery". In this novel approach, small unmanned aerial…