Life Cycle Assessment of using Drone for Delivery

Project Proposal

Introduction

Since the development of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) for aircraft target training program in British Army, drone market has been growing greatly due to its autonomous flying capacity which will enable multiple missions that humans were having trouble with1. Among various options, drone delivery system has been considered as the one of the major applications and currently various tech companies are dealing with U.S FAA regulation2. Amazon has already shown their first drone delivery mission in United Kingdom and various logistics companies around the world such as DHL have announced their new delivery system using drones3,4. As a research assistant at Autonomous Flight Systems Laboratory (AFSL) at University of Washington, I have been building drone docking system for more efficient and faster drone delivery system and would want to perform Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of drone delivery system to evaluate environmental impacts to have a better idea of building drone system.

There have been various researches about LCA and environmental impact of using drones for delivery5,6,7,10. Goodchild and Toy10 evaluated CO2 emission from drone delivery based on the type of energy drone uses and number of recipients. They have proposed new logistics model which includes building dozens of warehouses per metropolitan area in order to execute drone delivery system. Jiyoon Park7 and her team have evaluated LCA of using drone in delivery with comparison of motorcycle in delivery and also calculated expected environmental impact in South Korea by adding Korean government’s new renewable energy policies which will cover 13.4% total electricity by 2035. To get more data about drone delivery system, I will communicate with Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) which holds huge amount of drone information. The most relevant article for this project will be an article written by professor Goodchild at University of Washington10. I plan to communicate with her more in order to receive detailed delivery data and analysis methods. My project results will provide a mathematical model of environmental impact of using drones in delivery where the uses of drone will constantly increase. Also, necessary infrastructures for drone delivery system such as drone charging station, drone platform for packages and warehouses in metropolitan area will be designed for the region I have chosen. Total CO2 emission comparison table of drones and conventional truck method will be shown in the final project report as well as various pollutants created from their manufacturing process.

Description

While there have been various LCA reports about using drones in delivery, only few of those have focused on small geographical region. In order to evaluate more direct impact, assessing specific region could provide interesting results. Washington state in U.S is one of the major states where numerous drone related tech companies such as Boeing8, Insititu9, Amazon and various aerospace manufacturing companies are based on and WA state’s policy on using drones for delivery could be directly affected by this project results. Therefore, I would like to assess environmental impact of using drones for delivery compared to conventional ground force delivery system in WA. For project model, VTOL (Vertical Take-Off Landing) type drone where Amazon prime air has designed for delivery purpose will be used.

Drone delivery system is a novel way of transporting items to consumers using a drone or multiple drones in case of heavy item for faster and efficient reason11. Unlike conventional ground delivery method, drone delivery system can send the item to a certain point directly without any obstacle such as traffic jam, geographical limitation and time table. Also, drone delivery could be effective at night time where most of humans are sleeping.

In order to investigate drone delivery system, recent research process of following technologies will be tracked and described in the report: Autonomous take-off and landing, 3D object recognition, tracking with vision data, GPS, multi-rotor dynamics, multiple drone traffic system, automation packing for drones, drone manufacturing process and drone charging.

To model the system, Amazon prime air delivery system initiated in United Kingdom and Air taxi system in Dubai where autonomous drones transport human will be used as performance reference. This model will give delivery performance in terms of payload per energy consumption and the functional unit of this project will be CO2 emission for delivering 1000kg for 17 years. A comparison between ground delivery and drone delivery for this defined unit will be evaluated. Various mathematical models will be used for data analysis such as non-linear optimization, k-means and neural networks.

Environmental impact of drone delivery system can be estimated by calculating total energy used for drone operation which is generated from various energy plants that could cause CO2 emission, pollution from the discarded drones, pollutant emitted from drone manufacturing process, oil used for importing necessary materials for drone and manufactured drones from other countries and most importantly side effects from covering sun light. Also, reduced CO2 emission from expected ground delivery system will be considered in environmental perspective.

This LCA project is different from other various drone delivery LCA reports in geographical region that could provide more focused and accurate outcome that could be used as an effective reference to decide state environmental policy. This could useful for making environment standards for building necessary drone delivery infrastructures such as charging stations, multiple warehouses and drone platforms to land to drop the packages.

Reference

[1] Research and Markets Adds Report: Circulating Tumor Cells Market Analysis By Technology, By Application and Segment - Forecasts To 2020. (2015). Manufacturing Close-Up, Manufacturing Close-Up, Nov 10, 2015.

[2] Markman, J. (2018). FAA To Expand UAS (Drone) Airspace Authorization Program. Mondaq Business Briefing, p. Mondaq Business Briefing, March 22, 2018.

[3] CNN. (2013). Amazon's drone delivery: How would it work?. CNN Wire, p. CNN Wire, Dec 2, 2013.

[4] Khaled "Tito" Hamze. (2016). Crunch Report | Amazon Drone Delivery Begins in U.K. TechCrunch, p. TechCrunch, Dec 14, 2016.

[5] Neuberger, B., Thorn, Brian K., Babbitt, Callie, & Grasman, Scott. (2017). An Exploration of Commercial Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) Through Life Cycle Assessments, ProQuest Dissertations and Theses.

[6] Stolaroff, J. K., Samaras, C. R., O'Neill, E. S., Mitchell, A., Ceperley, D., & Lubers, A. (2018). Energy use and life cycle greenhouse gas emissions of drones for commercial package delivery. Nature Communications, 9(1), .

[7] Park, J., Kim, S., & Suh, K. (2018). A Comparative Analysis of the Environmental Benefits of Drone-Based Delivery Services in Urban and Rural Areas. Sustainability, 10(3), .

[8] Cameron, D. (2017). Boeing Expands Its Drone, Pilotless Aircraft Business. Wall Street Journal, p. B.1.

[9] Pasztor, A. (2016). Delivery Drones Years Away. Wall Street Journal, p. B.3.

[10] Goodchild, & Toy. (2017). Delivery by drone: An evaluation of unmanned aerial vehicle technology in reducing CO2 emissions in the delivery service industry. Transportation Research Part D, 61, 58-67.

[11] Bamburry, D. (2015). Drones: Designed for Product Delivery. Design Management Review, 26(1), 40-48.