Since the application of UAV technology has expanded from high-tech weapons to industrial production, and even mass consumer goods, people have been exploring new application fields of UAV, such as aerial photography, plant protection, line patrol and so on. Especially in today's so developed express industry, logistics is also a major application scenario of UAV. Major logistics and e-commerce companies (such as Amazon, DHL, Jingdong, SF, etc.) have all proposed and implemented their own research plans for logistics drones. Although most of the projects are far from the practical stage, and some are still in the initial design stage, the application of logistics drones is bound to be more and more widespread in the foreseeable future. Of course, there are deep reasons behind the concern of major companies and the slow progress of the project. This paper will briefly sort out the development situation of logistics UAV, the technical details involved and the conditions needed for its popularization.

Before we get into the current state of logistics drone development, we can imagine a few logistics scenarios to start thinking about why we need drones in logistics:

Scenario 1: Deliver the TV from an e-commerce warehouse in the city to a customer's home;

Scenario 2: Urban moving service;

Scenario 3: Deliver daily necessities to ten customers;

Scenario 4: Send urgent documents to a high-rise office building in a nearby city;

Scenario 5: Deliver first aid medicine to patients in mountainous areas;

Scenario 6: Deliver emergency supplies to a number of villages and towns in the earthquake area.

For mature UAV (with high reliability, high intelligence and sufficient battery life), it can basically meet the application requirements of the latter three scenarios. Therefore, several advantages of UAV logistics can be obtained from the above simple application scenarios:

First of all, relative to the ground transportation, unmanned aerial vehicle (uav) logistics has the advantages of convenient and quick, especially in a congested city and the remote mountain areas are in urgent need of goods, transportation may be than land saving 80% of the time, and according to the experience of developed countries, the high-rise building will increasingly provide helipads, can also convenient unmanned aircraft take-off and landing.

Secondly, UAV logistics can effectively save the consumption of human resources. The delivery tasks in complex environments and in large quantities are handed over to people and ground vehicles, while the delivery tasks in small quantities in simple scenes are handed over to UAVs, which can give full play to the flexible efficiency of manpower and reduce physical consumption.

In addition, under extreme conditions, UAVs can easily reach areas that can't be reached by ground vehicles. For example, in the delivery of emergency relief materials, UAVs can greatly improve the delivery efficiency when they cooperate with helicopters.

In the above aspects, logistics UAV can indeed solve several important problems of logistics, such as timeliness, cheapness and accessibility. This is also the basic starting point for logistics and e-commerce companies around the world to be optimistic about logistics UAV. Of course, it is also clear that even a predictable, mature form of UAVs will not be able to deliver the first three high-volume, complex scenarios at a lower cost. After sorting out the advantages and disadvantages of UAV logistics, and taking this as the premise, we can better understand the starting point and feasibility of the current logistics UAV projects, and predict what the mature logistics UAV should look like.