On-Demand Grocery Delivery From Multiple Local Stores With Autonomous Robots

Abstract

The advances in the area of autonomous delivery robots combined with customers' desire for fast delivery, bare potential for same-day delivery operations, specifically with small time windows between ordering and delivery. Most sameday deliveries are operated using a single depot and with vehicles' routes planned and fixed when leaving the depot. In this paper, we relax these two assumptions and focus on ondemand grocery delivery using a fleet of autonomous vehicles or robots. The problem features the opportunity to pick up goods at multiple local stores or depots, for example, supermarkets within the city, and allows robots to perform depot returns prior to being empty, if beneficial. This allows for more agile planning and on average shorter distance to the next depot. We propose a novel dynamic method for the same-day delivery problem, where we aim to deliver orders as fast as possible, minimally within the same day. In each time step (every few seconds or minutes) the following is executed: For each order potential pick-up locations are identified and feasible trips, i.e., sequences to pick up goods and deliver orders, are calculated. To assign trips to robots an integer-linear program is solved. We simulate one day of service in a city under different conditions with up to 30 autonomous robots, 30 depots and 10,500 orders. Results underpin the advantages of the proposed method and show its versatility with respect to different situations.

A Non-Contact Object Delivery System Using Leader-Follower Formation Control for Multi-Robots

“…The difference between the velocities of the active wheels creates rotational motion. The velocities of the left and right wheels are defined as in (1) and (2).…”

“…Autonomous robots have become popular in the last decades since they improve the success rate of operations executed in the industry. Building up multi-robot autonomous systems can even upgrade the performance in the sense of cooperative task deployments including surveillance [1], search and delivery [2], agriculture [3], and space missions [4], [5]. When working with cooperative robotic systems, specifically in the object transportation area, three types of control strategy: 1) Formation Control, 2) Coordinated Impedance Control, and 3) Task Sequencing are observed [6].…”

Routing of Heterogeneous Fleets for Flash Deliveries via Vehicle Group Assignment

“…The proposed approach in this paper is building on a ridesharing method called Vehicle Group Assignment (VGA) [18], which shows great scalability. A retail context variation considering multiple depots was investigated by [19]. This work extends VGA to heterogeneous fleets.…”

“…Note that the proposed method does not take any future information into account and thus operates myopic. Doing so could improve obtained results[21],[22], but is regarded as future work.5[19] also provides a more detailed analysis of their proposed method. Interested readers are referred to their work for further details.…”

Minimum Energy Utilization Strategy for Fleet of Autonomous Robots in Urban Waste Management

“…During a service operation, it is necessary that the energy consumption of the robots performing the service and their assistance infrastructure is minimal, thereby supporting SDG-12-responsible consumption and production [3,4]. The authors of [5] optimized same-day deliveries for multiple robots at various depots, along with considerations for diverse conditions to reduce the average travel distance of robots to customers by incorporating agile planning with pre-empty returns to depots. The authors of [6] introduced an effective virtual-region-based shape control scheme for guiding a swarm of robots through unknown occluded environments with multiple targets, thereby optimizing the overall performance of a multi-robot system.…”