Cargo UAVs Pick-Up Systems for Low-Altitude Economy With Communication Quality, Battery Energy, and Time Window Constraints

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Mingjian Chen, Liang Yang, Jiangling Cao, Guangxu Zhu, Weijie Yuan, Hongbo Jiang, Dusit Niyato

Published: 2026, Last Modified: 25 May 2026IEEE Trans. Mob. Comput. 2026EveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY-SA 4.0
Abstract: The rapid development of the low-altitude economy (LAE) has accelerated the deployment of cargo unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for intelligent logistics and delivery services. However, large-scale UAV operations still face multiple practical challenges, including unstable communication connectivity, limited onboard battery energy, and strict customer time-window constraints. To address these issues, this paper investigates the trajectory and task scheduling optimization problem for multi-UAV cooperative cargo pick-up under joint communication, energy, and time-window constraints. We develop a collision-aware cooperative multi-UAV optimization algorithm (CACMO) that integrates a Dueling Deep Q-Network (D3QN) for communication-aware trajectory learning with a simulated annealing (SA) based global task-sequence planner and an explicit inter-UAV conflict-resolution mechanism. The D3QN module enables adaptive trajectory generation in unknown and time-varying radio environments without requiring an a priori radio map, maintaining stable connectivity while reducing flight cost, whereas the SA module determines efficient task orders and enforces safe coordination among multiple UAVs through collision-aware refinement. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed CACMO algorithm framework achieves an optimal balance between task completion time (1,719 seconds) and user satisfaction (score of 0.9969) under typical operating conditions, delivering a 70–75% reduction in total weighted cost compared to representative baseline methods. Crucially, this substantial improvement is achieved while explicitly enforcing multi-UAV collision avoidance—a critical constraint absent in most baseline methods. The framework maintains zero communication outage and guarantees safe inter-UAV separation throughout the mission while satisfying all energy and time window constraints in realistic urban environments, confirming its robustness and scalability for cooperative multi-UAV logistics operations within the LAE.