As online orders continue to grow, as well as the shortage of drivers, we look at the possibilities of using autonomous vehicles to travel the last mile. In this talk, I will discuss the potential gains from using package robots as well as autonomous delivery trucks. These trucks would drop off a delivery person to make deliveries on foot and pick up them up to drive to the next delivery area. This eliminates the time consuming process of looking for parking and walking to and from the parking spot. Our experiments show both options to be quite promising.

Package robots: Joint work with Iurii Bakach and Jan Ehmke

Autonomous delivery trucks: Joint work with Sara Reed and Barry Thomas