Startups’ autonomous drones accurately track warehouse inventory | MIT News

Whether you are a fulfillment center, manufacturer or distributor, speed is king. However, bringing products to a rapid pace requires workers to know where these products are always in their warehouses. This may sound obvious, but losing or misplaced inventory is a major issue in warehouses around the world.

Corvus Robotics is solving this problem using an inventory management platform that uses automated drones to scan towering pallet rows that fill most warehouses. The company’s drones can work 24/7, whether warehouse lights are on or off, scanning barcodes with human workers to make them unprecedented in their product.

“Often, warehouses will have inventory twice a year — we change it to weekly or faster,” said Mohammed Kabir ’21, Corvus co-founder and CTO. “You get huge operational efficiency from it.”

Corvus is already helping distributors, logistics providers, manufacturers and grocery stores track their inventory. Through this work, the company has helped customers achieve a huge improvement in warehouse efficiency and speed.

The key to Corvus’ success is to build a driverless platform that can automatically run in tough environments like warehouses, GPS doesn’t work, and Wi-Fi may only use cameras and neural networks for navigation. With this capability, the company believes its drones are expected to provide new precision in the way they produce and store products in warehouses around the world.

A new inventory management solution

Kabir has been working on drones since he was 14 years old.

“I was interested in drones before the drone industry even existed,” Kabir said. “I would work with people I found on the internet. At the time, it was just a group of enthusiasts to see if they could work.”

In 2017, Kabir came to MIT and received news from Jackie Wu, the final Corvus co-founder, who was a Northwestern student at the time. Wu is part of the open source drone project that will bring Kabir some of its work in drone navigation in GPS depreciating environments. Students decide to see if they can use their work as a foundation for the company.

Kabir started working on idle nights and weekends through his coursework at the MIT Aviation and Astronaut Department. The founders initially tried to use ready-made drones and provided them with sensors and computing power. Ultimately, they realized they had to design drones from scratch, because off-the-shelf drones didn’t provide the low-level control and access required to establish full differential autonomy.

Kabir built the first drone prototype in the dormitory room in Simmons Hall and brought each new iteration to the field.

“We would build these drone prototypes and take them out and see if they would fly, and then we would go back inside and start building our autonomous system on top of them,” Kabir recalls.

While working at Corvus, Kabir was also one of the founders of the MIT driverless program, which established the first driverless car in North America to win a race.

“It’s all part of the same autonomous story,” Kabir said. “I’ve always been very interested in building robots that don’t touch.”

From the outset, the founders believed that inventory management was a promising application of its drone technology. Eventually, they rented a facility in Boston and simulated a warehouse with huge shelves and boxes to perfect their technology.

By the time Kabir graduated in 2021, Corvus had completed several pilots with clients. One client is MSI, a building materials company that distributes flooring, countertops, ceramic tiles and more. Soon, MSI used Corvus every day in several facilities in its national network.

Corvus One drone, the company calls the world’s first fully autonomous warehouse inventory management drone, comes with 14 cameras and AI systems that allow it to navigate securely to scan barcodes and record the location of each product. In most cases, the collected data is shared with the customer’s warehouse management system (usually the warehouse’s recording system) and any discrepancies determined are automatically classified by the recommended resolution. In addition, the Corvus interface allows customers to select flightless zones, select flight behaviors and set automatic flight schedules.

“When we started, we didn’t know if lifelong vision-based autonomy in the warehouse was possible,” Kabir said. “It turns out that using traditional computer vision technology to make infrastructure-free autonomy work really hard. We are the first in the world to use machine learning and neural network-based approaches to deliver learning-based autonomy stacks for indoor aerial robots. We used AI before it was cool.”

To set up, Corvus’ team simply installs one or more docks at the end of the product rack that acts as a charging and data transmission station and uses a tape measurer to complete a rough mapping step. Then, the drone fills in the exquisite details themselves. Kabir said it would take about a week to fully operate in a one-million-square-foot facility.

“We don’t have to set up any stickers, reflectors or beacons,” Kabir said. “We set up very quickly compared to other options in the industry. We call it infrastructure-free autonomy, which is a big differentiation for us.”

From forklift to drone

Many of today’s inventory management is done by people who use a forklift or scissor lift to scan barcodes and take notes on the clipboard. The result is that sometimes the inventory checks are rarely and inaccurate inventory checks are required for warehouse closure operations.

“They move up and down on these lifts and all of these manual steps are involved,” Kabir said. “You have to collect data manually and then there is a data entry step because none of these systems are connected. We found that many warehouses are driven by bad data and cannot resolve the issue unless you fix the data you collect first.”

Corvus can bring inventory management systems and processes together. Its drones also operate safely around people and forklifts every day.

“It’s a core goal for us,” Kabir said. “When we get into the warehouse, it’s a privilege that customers give us. We don’t want to disrupt their operations, we build a system around that idea. You can fly anytime, anywhere, and the system will follow your schedule.”

Kabir has believed that Corvus provides the most comprehensive inventory management solution. Moving forward, the company will offer more end-to-end solutions to manage the moment the warehouse arrives.

“Drones actually only solve part of the inventory problem,” Kabir said. “The drones are flying around to track shelf pallet stocks, but even before they are delivered to the shelf, a lot of things are lost. The product arrives, they are taken off the truck, and then stack them on the floor, before they are moved to the shelf, the items are lost, they are lost. They are misplaced, they are wrong, they are wrong, they are just solved. Our vision is to solve it.”