Delivery path planning of heterogeneous robot system under road network constraints

This paper focuses on the path-planning problem of a heterogeneous robot system applied to parcel delivery in urban environments. The system consists of an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) and an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The UGV is restricted to drive in road network. The UAV unloads parcels from UGV and delivers them to customers. This study considers on the route schemes of UGV and UAV together on the basis of an air-ground cooperating. A two-step strategy combining ant colony optimization (ACO) and genetic algorithm (GA) is proposed to decouple their routes. In the first step, the ACO is used to search for UGV's routes. In the second step, the GA is employed to solve the routes of UAV once the routes of UGV are pre-decided in the first step. Simulation results show that the method can effectively solve the heterogeneous delivering problem and obtain an optimal route of UAV.