An Empirical Study of UAV’s Delivery Path Planning

Package has become a necessity in our life, according to “FedEx Express' total average packages delivered daily 2016-2021.” In 2021, 6.68 million packages will be delivered every day. So how to efficiently deliver express delivery has become a hot topic nowadays (E. Mazareanu, 2021) [1]. Many companies have proposed using UAVs to deliver packages and are actively developing and implementing such delivery methods. In order to make delivery faster in real life, the author used the A* algorithm to plan the route of delivery from the UAV to customers. The author chose the architectural layout of the University of Minnesota in Twin Cities for the simulation experiment and designed a total of three scenarios. The first one was to plan the optimal path for the UAV between the campus buildings to deliver the package to customers. The second is to order UAVs to fly over the campus and deliver deliveries to customers. The third is to cross the Mississippi River and instruct the UAV to choose to fly along the Washington Avenue Bridge to deliver a package to a customer. Finally, the author concludes that the choice of delivery route should be related to the address of the customer.