Replacing urban trucks via ground–air cooperation

The advent of drones is leading to a paradigm shift in courier services, while their large-scale deployment is confined by a limited range. Here, we design a low-cost product that allows drones to drop parcels onto and pick them up from the roofs of moving passenger vehicles. With this, we propose a ground-air cooperation (GAC) based business model for parcel delivery in an urban environment. As per our case study using real-world data in Beijing, the new business model will not only shorten the parcel delivery time by 86.5% with a comparable cost, but also reduce road traffic by 8.6%, leading to an annual social benefit of 6.67 billion USD for Beijing. The proposed model utilizes the currently “wasted or unused” rooftops of passenger vehicles and has the potential to replace most parcel trucks and trailers, thus fundamentally addressing the congestion, noise, pollution, and road wear and tear problems caused by trucks, and bringing in immense social benefit.