We autonomously directed a small quadcopter package delivery Uncrewed Aerial Vehicle (UAV) or “drone” to take off, fly a specified route, and land for a total of 209 flights while varying a set of operational parameters. The vehicle was equipped with onboard sensors, including GPS, IMU, voltage and current sensors, and an ultrasonic anemometer, to collect high-resolution data on the inertial states, wind speed, and power consumption. Operational parameters, such as commanded ground speed, payload, and cruise altitude, were varied for each flight. This large data set has a total flight time of 10 hours and 45 minutes and was collected from April to October of 2019 covering a total distance of approximately 65 kilometers. The data collected were validated by comparing flights with similar operational parameters. We believe these data will be of great interest to the research and industrial communities, who can use the data to improve UAV designs, safety, and energy efficiency, as well as advance the physical understanding of in-flight operations for package delivery drones.

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Transportation is an essential component of living in smart cities, but what would mobility in smart cities look like? This article is an overview of the opportunities and challenges presented by smart mobility.

Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) data is an inexpensive and ubiquitous source of activity data. Global Positioning System (GPS) is an example of such data. Although there have been several studies about inferring device activity using GPS data from a consumer device, freight GPS data presents unique challenges for example having low and variable frequency, having long transmission gaps, and frequent and unpredictable device ID resetting for preserving privacy. This study aims to provide an end-to-end, generic data analytical framework to infer multiple aspects of truck activity such as stops, trips and tours. We use popular existing methods to construct the data processing pipeline and provide insights into their practical usage. We also propose improved data filters to different aspects of the data processing pipeline to address challenges found in privacy-preserving freight GPS data. We use freight data across four weeks from the greater Philadelphia region with variable transmission frequency ranging from one second to several hours to perform experiments and validate our methods. Our findings indicate that auxiliary information such as land use can be helpful in fine tuning stop inference,but spatio-temporal information contained in timestamped GPS pings is still the most powerful source of false stop identification. We also find that a combination of simple clustering techniques can provide a way to perform fast and reasonable clustering of the same stop.