DPD publishes paper on autonomous delivery vehicles

DPD has teamed up with research partners fka (Forschungsgesellschaft Kraftfahrwesen mbH Aachen) and ika (RWTH Aachen University’s Institut für Kraftfahrzeuge) to publish a paper on self-driving vehicles.

According to the paper, automated vehicles could make it “possible to deliver at least part of the company’s parcel volumes with an unprecedented degree of flexibility”, enabling greater efficiency and convenience for customers.

The paper predicts “entirely new delivery concepts, in particular for inner-city areas”, including autonomous parking in the city centre, mobile pickup stations (automated parcel lockers), and app-controlled time and place of delivery by driverless parcel transporter.

However, we aren’t likely to see these concepts come to fruition in the immediate future: the paper states that they “will probably not be in place until the year 2025 at the earliest”.

DPD is currently trialling inner-city “micro depots”, decentralised distribution points, in a pilot project run by the University of Applied Sciences in Nuremberg.

(Source: Post & Parcel)