Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for urban and clinical–logistics missions operate under severe constraints in onboard energy, computation, and payload integrity. Addressing these challenges requires not only advanced algorithms but also a tight integration between embedded hardware, energy management, perception, and decision-making. This paper presents a unified UAV platform based on a system-level hardware–software co-design. First, a compact six-layer PCB (85 mm × 55 mm) integrates an NVIDIA Jetson Orin for on-edge artificial intelligence and a dedicated microcontroller for real-time flight control, with explicit power-domain separation, thermal management via arrays, and physical isolation of sensitive sensors. Second, a hybrid energy system combines LiPo batteries with perovskite photovoltaic cells and an MPPT stage with experimentally measured efficiency (94.5%), enabling stable operation under variable irradiance conditions. Third, an autonomous navigation strategy based on a Dueling Double Deep Q Network with Prioritized Experience Replay learns energy-efficient trajectories while explicitly incorporating payload thermal deviation (ΔT) and mechanical jerk into the reward function, thereby supporting clinically safe transport. Experimental validation on the physical platform includes onboard power and latency measurements, statistical evaluation across training and deterministic execution, and mission-level key performance indicators. Results show an average reduction of 18.4% in total energy consumption and a 12.1% increase in operational coverage under representative urban scenarios, with end-to-end decision latency below 50 ms. These findings demonstrate that a tightly integrated design of embedded hardware, hybrid energy management, and clinical-aware reinforcement learning enables robust, efficient, and application-ready UAV systems for urban and healthcare missions.
Bibbo’ et al. (Wed,) studied this question.