  With the rapid increase in congestion, alternative solutions are needed to
efficiently use the capacity of our existing networks. This paper focuses on
exploring the emerging autonomous technologies for on-demand food delivery in
congested urban cities. Three different last mile food delivery systems are
proposed in this study employing aerial and ground autonomous vehicles
technologies. The three proposed systems are: robot delivery system, drone
delivery system and a hybrid delivery system. In the hybrid system the concept
of hub-and-spoke network is explored in order to consolidate orders and reach
more destinations in less time. To investigate the performance of the three
proposed delivery systems, they are applied to the city of Mississauga network,
in an in-house agent-based simulation in MATLAB. 18 Scenarios are tested
differing in terms of demand and fleet size. The results show that the hybrid
robot-drone delivery system performs the best with a fleet side of 25 robots
and 15 drones and with an average preparation and delivery time less than the
individual robot and drone system by 48% and 42% respectively.
