Autonomous Drones Promise Precision For Warehouses

The warehousing of America, to keep up with e-commerce, reshoring of manufacturing, and the insertion of more slack into the nation’s supply chains, has demanded new technology to keep better and quicker track of all the extra boxes and pallets. The capabilities of humans using lifts and hand-held bar-code scanners to reach and catalog every last item in a multi-story warehouse are being outstripped by the tremendous expansion of needs.

Corvus Robotics makes and sells warehouse drones on a prescription basis to warehousers of auto parts, household appliances, chemicals, manufacturing materials, foods, beverage and more. Its customers bifurcate into third-party logistics providers and corporate customers who run their own warehouses.

 One of the specially designed devices is probably enough to handle the inventory needs of a small warehouse, up to around 100,000 square feet, while a fleet of a half dozen or so drones is required to cover the needs of a large, Amazon-style facility.

“Our drones are fully autonomous in a way not possible before,” Jackie Wu, co-founder and CEO of the drone manufacturer based in Mountain View, California, tells Chief Executive. The basketball-size drones operate 24/7 without external guidance. “They take off from a landing pad, fly around the warehouse without people or pilots. They go and look at every good in the warehouse, scan bar codes, count the number of boxes, see if they’re empty or not and jot this all down digitally. We’re using computer vision and machine learning to be 10 to 20 times faster than people managing inventories.”

Wu said that “the last two major innovations in tracking were bar codes, 70 years ago, and the invention of warehouse-management systems software about 40 years ago. “And essentially these things haven’t changed much in decades.” Drone deployers have been “working at this for almost 19 years, but the past technology has been very manual and handcrafted.

“Typically, they’ve taken an off-the-shelf drone and put a location bar code in every single location around a warehouse. But in a big warehouse, there are tens of thousands of locations of bar codes. These drones would crash and lose themselves. Or they’d have to put up wireless beacons all over the ceiling so drones would know where they were.

“Our technology is currently unique, and currently the only one in the world that allows drones to operate fully without any external infrastructure. Our drones create a map of the environment using AI and use that match to understand their environments.”

Wu called the form of AI used by the drones “embodied AI: It takes advantage of algorithms and computing that are an order of magnitude more powerful than in the past, so that AI can truly understand the drone’s environment and drive everything in it.”

Because the drones comprise very advanced manufacturing, Wu says, Corvus makes them in the United States. “Being at the cutting edge of enterprise, premium products, it makes sense to build them here,” he says. “The products we build in the U.S. have to be at the very highest in the technology chain. We don’t build a $40 drone you buy your nephew for Christmas. For consumer products, get them built in South China.

“But it’s truly for enterprise, costing six figures or more. We have 14 cameras on our drones and it’s a supercomputer that’s more powerful than a desktop computer. Based on the IP, it’s something we can afford to build in the U.S.”