Autonomous Drones Solve Big Inventory Management Issues

Enter the autonomous, aerial inventory counting drone. Equipped with advanced sensors and artificial intelligence-powered image recognition, these devices independently navigate warehouse aisles, capturing real-time inventory data quickly and accurately. The drones can also handle bulk scanning, which is usually more difficult to manage vs. counting individual units. 

In this Challenge Solved, Jackie Wu, founder and CEO at Corvus Robotics, highlights the key inventory management challenges organizations deal with on a daily basis and explains how autonomous inventory drones can get the job done faster, more efficiently and more accurately while freeing up warehouse employees to focus on more strategic projects.

Q: What inventory management roadblocks are keeping warehouse and DC operators up at night right now?

A: Inventory control is something that every warehouse operator, distributor, retailer and third-party logistics provider (3PL) has to do. And it has to be done efficiently, accurately and with as little disruption as possible to the operation itself.

Until recently, the manual method of counting inventory hasn’t changed much in the last 50 years: employees use handheld barcode scanners to go up and down the aisle in material handling equipment, counting stock. The growth and pace of e-commerce has pushed many companies to rethink this approach, mainly in the name of better downstream inventory accuracy.

In the U.S., typical inventory accuracy is around 70%, which can quickly spiral into a mad rush to find missing SKUs, entirely too much labor being thrown at the problem, and then, of course, unhappy customers who don’t receive their orders on time.

Q: How do aerial inventory drones solve these and other problems that most warehouses are facing?

A: Corvus One is the world’s first and only fully- autonomous inventory counting drone. Installation and implementation are fast and simple. You don’t have to put up 10,000 stickers or hundreds of beacons on the warehouse’s ceiling for navigation, nor do you need a strong Wi-Fi signal. All the system requires is a landing pad and the drone.

The drones are truly autonomous in that they take off from the landing pad on their missions, come back, land, recharge and take off on their next flight. This saves a lot of man hours spent walking around the warehouse or DC floor looking for SKUs and double-checking that the items are where they’re supposed
to be. Instead, employees can manage exceptions and let the technology and AI do the rest.

Q: What type of efficiency gains can facilities expect once the drones are up and flying?

A: Between the AI, robotics and autonomy, workers will be an average of 10-20 times more efficient, with other key benefits including reduced costs and inventory quality improvements, both of which positively impact customer satisfaction and revenue.

Q: Why is bulk inventory scanning so much more difficult than traditional inventory counts?

A: Companies will often store bulk goods on the floor, making the items very difficult to access and account for. For example, they may be stacked at multiple heights and stored at multiple depths. To count SKUs on the bottom and way in the back, you have to use material handling equipment to pull all these pallets out and visually identify a pallet. This takes a lot of time and effort—so much so that the inventory stored out of reach may languish there unsold for months or even years.

Q: How do Corvus’ autonomous inventory drones help resolve these bulk inventory management issues?

A: A compact aerial drone can easily fly overhead, look down and scan the sides of the bulk goods to see which pallet is where, how many cases are in the pallets and other details. It’s an elegant, modern solution that uses AI to solve the age-old problem of how to count floor storage or goods stored in bulk in more inaccessible areas of the warehouse.

Q: What other functions can autonomous inventory drones manage that would be difficult to manage using traditional counting strategies?

A: Corvus’ drones can scan barcodes regardless of orientation, type of barcode or where that barcode is placed, as long as it’s visible from the front. The drones take pictures and then use AI and computer vision to report back on the placement and counts. This can also help companies that are dealing with space constraints, and that would benefit from consolidating multiple locations of the same SKU.

The drones are made in the USA and our software has been developed in-house, so the latter can be adjusted according to customer needs (e.g., very narrow aisles, refrigerated environments, changes to racking layouts, etc.). Finally, because the drones are equipped with collision avoidance sensors, the company storing cases or pallets both in racks and on the ground, can use them safely and frequently.

Learn more about Corvus Robotics.