Drone-Based Material Transfer System in a Robotic Mobile Fulfillment Center

摘要

Deploying unmanned aerial vehicles, also known as drones, for final-mile delivery in logistics operations has inspired this research. One conceivable scenario is to use the drone to transfer jobs in a robotic mobile fulfillment center. Each job might be characterized by origin, destination, time window, and precedence relation. In particular, a take-away conveyor is continuously pushing forward shipping cartons, wherein drones must pick up jobs and drop them off to the cartons within the time window since the cartons would be closed and labeled at the end of the conveyor. Furthermore, each job contains two subtransfers for drone: flight from drone's current location to pickup location and flight to dropoff location. Two exact approaches are proposed-a mixed integer programming and a constraint programming-and tested for a real-time perspective. Note to Practitioners-Inspired by Amazon's significant expansion of its army of warehouse robots and the adaptation of drones for final-mile small parcel delivery, this article has mixed those two emerging technologies and proposed a drone-powered material transfer system in a warehouse, wherein jobs would be picked up by drone, transferred, and dropped off directly to shipping cartons. The most encouraging finding is that the proposed method impressively proved the optimality of 144 jobs with 10 drones that requires 28.8 transfers per drone on average, within 1 s.