2018
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-017-02411-5
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Energy use and life cycle greenhouse gas emissions of drones for commercial package delivery

Abstract: The use of automated, unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) to deliver commercial packages is poised to become a new industry, significantly shifting energy use in the freight sector. Here we find the current practical range of multi-copters to be about 4 km with current battery technology, requiring a new network of urban warehouses or waystations as support. We show that, although drones consume less energy per package-km than delivery trucks, the additional warehouse energy required and the longer distances tra… Show more

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Cited by 292 publications
(292 citation statements)
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“…However, decarbonizing the last mile of the shipment by means of technology is comparatively easier, for example through low-carbon vehicles such as rickshaws, tricycles, or electric vehicles [91]. While many are working to develop autonomous delivery robots and drones, at least some authors have expressed doubts that such vehicles can easily reduce freight GHG emissions from urban logistics [3,92].…”
Section: Strategy 5: Shifting Freight To Low Carbonintensity Modesmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…However, decarbonizing the last mile of the shipment by means of technology is comparatively easier, for example through low-carbon vehicles such as rickshaws, tricycles, or electric vehicles [91]. While many are working to develop autonomous delivery robots and drones, at least some authors have expressed doubts that such vehicles can easily reduce freight GHG emissions from urban logistics [3,92].…”
Section: Strategy 5: Shifting Freight To Low Carbonintensity Modesmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…[5] In addition, electric vehicles and drones, which are advancing rapidly, call for advanced energy storage devices with higher energy/power densities. [6,7] The various needs from a compact mobile device to a grid system have accelerated the development of a new type of ESD with high electrochemical performance, such as lithium metal batteries (LMBs), [8][9][10][11] sodium ion/metal batteries, [12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20] multivalent metal ion batteries, [21][22][23] metal-air/sulfur batteries, [24][25][26][27][28] and organic redox flow batteries. [29] Among them, LMBs are one of the most promising candidates owing to their high working voltage and large theoretical capacities.…”
Section: Sodium Metal Batteriesmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…The energy consumption by a flying UAV is mainly spent to overcome the gravity for staying in the air, as well as drag forces due to wind and forward motions. Building on the model in [12], the minimum power with forward motion for a UAV is given by…”
Section: A Flying and Hovering Energy Consumptionmentioning
confidence: 99%