Cooperative Air-Ground Instant Delivery by UAVs and Crowdsourced Taxis

Instant delivery has become a fundamental service in people's daily lives. Different from the traditional express service, the instant delivery has a strict shipping time constraint after being ordered. However, the labor shortage makes it challenging to realize efficient instant delivery. To tackle the problem, researchers have studied to introduce vehicles (i.e., taxis) or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs or drones) into instant delivery tasks. Unfortunately, the delivery detour of taxis and the limited battery of UAVs make it hard to meet the rapidly increasing instant delivery demands. Under this circumstance, this paper proposes an air-ground cooperative instant delivery paradigm to maximize the delivery performance and meanwhile minimize the negative effects on the taxi passengers. Specifically, a data-driven delivery potential-demands-aware cooperative strategy is designed to improve the overall delivery performance of both UAVs and taxis as well as the taxi passengers' experience. The experimental results show that the proposed method improves the delivery number by 30.1% and 114.5% compared to the taxi-based and UAV-based instant delivery respectively, and shortens the delivery time by 35.7% compared to the taxi-based instant delivery.