Abstract
In recent years, the development of the e-commerce business and the resulting shortage of manpower for delivery service providers have led to the need to improve the efficiency of the last mile of logistics. Automated delivery vehicles are attracting attention as a powerful means of increasing the sustainability of complex urban logistics. In the development of automated delivery vehicles, actuator control using preview sensors such as LiDAR (Light Detected and Ranging) and machine learning algorithms is the mainstream. However, it is difficult to completely remove disturbances such as road surface irregularities, bumps, and slopes that exist on public roads. In this study, we proposed a round guide rail mechanism as a simple design to suppress the tilt of the load on the delivery cart without control, in order to protect the load when entering the slope. It was confirmed that the tendency of the numerical calculation by the analytical model and the driving experiment on the actual vehicle were consistent. Furthermore, the analytical model of the delivery cart was used to search for the optimal design parameters to reduce the sway of the load on the delivery cart. As a result, it was suggested that the existence of optimal design parameters for delivery cart under the appropriate evaluation index. In the future, it will be necessary to apply the round guide rail mechanism to an automatic delivery vehicle and verify the effectiveness of the mechanism under the assumption of actual last mile delivery.
