In addition to its crucial impact on customer satisfaction, last-mile
delivery (LMD) is notorious for being the most time-consuming and costly stage
of the shipping process. Pressing environmental concerns combined with the
recent surge of e-commerce sales have sparked renewed interest in automation
and electrification of last-mile logistics. To address the hurdles faced by
existing robotic couriers, this paper introduces a customer-centric and
safety-conscious LMD system for small urban communities based on AI-assisted
autonomous delivery robots. The presented framework enables end-to-end
automation and optimization of the logistic process while catering for
real-world imposed operational uncertainties, clients' preferred time
schedules, and safety of pedestrians. To this end, the integrated optimization
component is modeled as a robust variant of the Cumulative Capacitated Vehicle
Routing Problem with Time Windows, where routes are constructed under uncertain
travel times with an objective to minimize the total latency of deliveries
(i.e., the overall waiting time of customers, which can negatively affect their
satisfaction). We demonstrate the proposed LMD system's utility through
real-world trials in a university campus with a single robotic courier.
Implementation aspects as well as the findings and practical insights gained
from the deployment are discussed in detail. Lastly, we round up the
contributions with numerical simulations to investigate the scalability of the
developed mathematical formulation with respect to the number of robotic
vehicles and customers