Whether you're a success center, a manufacturer, or a retailer, speed is king. However, so as to deliver products quickly, employees have to know where these products are of their warehouses in any respect times. This may sound obvious, but lost or misplaced inventory is a significant problem in warehouses around the globe.
Corvus Robotics is tackling this problem with a listing management platform that uses autonomous drones to scan the vast rows of pallets that fill most warehouses. The company's drones can work across the clock, no matter whether the warehouse lights are on or off, scanning barcodes alongside human employees to offer them an unprecedented view of their products.
“Typically, warehouses do inventory twice a 12 months – we’re moving this to once per week or faster,” says Corvus co-founder and CTO Mohammed Kabir ’21. “This brings enormous operational efficiency.”
Corvus already helps retailers, logistics providers, manufacturers and grocers track their inventory. Through this work, the corporate has helped its customers achieve huge improvements in efficiency and speed of their warehouses.
The key to Corvus' success was constructing a drone platform that may operate autonomously in difficult environments like warehouses where GPS doesn't work and Wi-Fi could also be weak, using only cameras and neural networks for navigation. With this capability, the corporate believes its drones are able to enabling recent levels of precision within the manufacturing and storage of products in warehouses around the globe.
A novel inventory management solution
Kabir has been working with drones since he was 14 years old.
“I used to be interested by drones before the drone industry even existed,” says Kabir. “I might work with people I discovered on the web. Back then it was just a couple of hobbyists putting things together to see in the event that they would work.”
In 2017, the identical 12 months Kabir arrived at MIT, he received a message from his future Corvus co-founder Jackie Wu, who was a student at Northwestern University on the time. Wu had seen a few of Kabir's work on drone navigation in environments without GPS as a part of an open source drone project. The students decided to see if they may use the work as the premise for a business.
Kabir began working on off nights and weekends while juggling constructing the Corvus technology along with his coursework in MIT's aerospace department. The founders initially tried to make use of commercially available drones and equip them with sensors and computing power. Eventually, they realized that they had to develop their drones from scratch because commercially available drones didn't offer the form of low-level control and access they needed to construct full-life cycle autonomy.
Kabir built the primary drone prototype in his dorm room in Simmons Hall and started flying each new edition on the sector outside the door.
“We built these drone prototypes and brought them out to see in the event that they would even fly. Then we went back in and commenced constructing our autonomy systems on top of that,” Kabir recalls.
While working on the Corvus, Kabir was also considered one of the founders of the MIT Driverless program, which built North America's first winning driverless racing cars.
“It’s all a part of the identical autonomy story,” says Kabir. “I even have all the time been very interested by constructing robots that function without human touch.”
From the start, the founders believed that inventory management was a promising application for his or her drone technology. Eventually, they rented a facility in Boston and simulated a warehouse with huge shelves and boxes to refine their technology.
By the time Kabir graduated in 2021, Corvus had accomplished several pilot projects with customers. One customer was MSI, a constructing materials company that sells flooring, countertops, tiles and more. Soon, MSI was using Corvus every day at multiple facilities across its nationwide network.
The Corvus One drone, which the corporate calls the world's first fully autonomous inventory management drone, is provided with 14 cameras and an AI system that permits secure navigation to scan barcodes and record the placement of every product. In most cases, the collected data is passed to the shopper's warehouse management system (often the warehouse's system of record) and any discrepancies found are robotically categorized with a suggested solution. In addition, customers can select no-fly zones, set flight behavior and set automated flight plans via the Corvus interface.
“When we began, we didn’t know whether lifelong, vision-based autonomy in camps was even possible,” says Kabir. “It seems that getting infrastructure-free autonomy to work using traditional computer vision techniques is de facto difficult. We were the primary on this planet to bring to market a learning-based autonomy stack for an indoor flying robot based on machine learning and neural network-based approaches. We were using AI before it was cool.”
To set it up, the Corvus team simply installs a number of docks, which function charging and data transfer stations, on the ends of the product shelves and performs a rough mapping step using tape measures. The drones then add the small print independently. Kabir says it takes about per week for a 1 million square foot facility to be fully operational.
“We don’t need to put stickers, reflectors or beacons,” says Kabir. “Our setup is de facto fast in comparison with other options within the industry. We call it infrastructure-free autonomy and it’s a giant differentiator for us.”
From forklifts to drones
Today, much inventory management is completed by an individual using a forklift or scissor lift to scan barcodes and make notes on a clipboard. The result’s erratic and inaccurate inventory controls, sometimes causing warehouses to shut operations.
“You go up and down on these elevators, and it requires all these manual steps,” says Kabir. “You need to capture the info manually, then there’s a knowledge entry step because none of those systems are connected. We found that many warehouses are driven by erroneous data, and there isn’t a technique to fix that unless you correct the info you collect in the primary place.”
Corvus can bring together inventory management systems and processes. The drones are also used safely daily near people and forklifts.
“That was a key goal for us,” says Kabir. “When we enter a warehouse, it’s a privilege that the shopper has given us. We don't wish to disrupt their operations and are constructing a system based on this concept. You can fly it every time you wish it and the system works around your schedule.”
Kabir already believes that Corvus offers essentially the most comprehensive inventory management solution available. Moving forward, the corporate will offer more end-to-end inventory management solutions as they arrive in warehouses.
“Drones actually only solve a part of the inventory problem,” says Kabir. “Drones fly around to trace pallet inventory on shelves, but many things wander away before they even reach the shelves. Products arrive, are picked up by a truck after which stacked on the ground, and before they get to the shelves the items have been lost. They are mislabeled, misplaced and easily gone. Our vision is to resolve this problem.”
