A Viewpoint on the Challenges and Solutions for Driverless Last-Mile Delivery

The occurring growth in e-commerce comes along with an increasing number of first-time delivery failures due to the customer’s absence at the delivery location. Failed deliveries result in rework, causing a significant impact on the carriers’ delivery cost. Hence, the last mile is the portion of a journey that involves moving people and commodities from a transportation hub to a final destination, which should be an efficient process. The above-mentioned concept is used in supply chain management and transportation planning. The paper at hand is a position paper that aims to scrutinize the concept of driverless last-mile delivery, with autonomous vehicles, in order to highlight and stress the challenges and limitations in the existing technology that hinder level five autonomous driving. Specifically, this work documents the current capabilities of the existing autonomous vehicles’ perception and cognition system and outlines their future skills towards addressing complete autonomous last-mile delivery, as well as efficient robotic process automation in logistics from warehouse/distribution center to hub’s delivery.