Abstract: In recent years, the demand of express industry has increased rapidly, and the express industry is under increasing pressure. The Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) delivery has become a effective supplement to vehicle delivery due to its low human cost, flexibility and convenience. However, UAVs are often limited by endurance and load capacity, A low cost and energy self-sustaining scheduling scheme for delivery and charging is needed. This paper proposes a two-stage self-sustaining multiple UAV cooperative delivery and charging scheduling scheme. The first stage, aims to find the delivery routes of UAVs to complete all delivery tasks in the region such that the number of UAVs is minimized under the load capacity and energy constraints of UAVs. The UAV Delivery Scheduling Algorithm (UDSA) is proposed, and the approximation of UDSA is proved theoretically. The second stage aims to schedule the charging of UAVs with different arrival times to minimize the maximum charging completion time of all UAVs. An approximate UAV Delivery Scheduling Algorithm (UCSA) is proposed to solve the problem. The simulation results show that, compared with the benchmark algorithm, UDSA can reduce the number of UAVs by 44.17% at most, and UCSA can reduce the maximum charging completion time by 18.87% at most.

Key words:  UAV, delivery scheduling, vehicle routing problem, wireless charging scheduling