Whether you’re a success center, a manufacturer, or a distributor, speed is king. But getting products out the door quickly requires staff to know where those products are situated of their warehouses in any respect times. Which will sound obvious, but lost or misplaced inventory is a serious problem in warehouses around the globe.
Corvus Robotics is addressing that problem with a listing management platform that uses autonomous drones to scan the towering rows of pallets that fill most warehouses. The corporate’s drones can work 24/7, whether warehouse lights are on or off, scanning barcodes alongside human staff to offer them an unprecedented view of their products.
“Typically, warehouses will do inventory twice a yr — we modify that to once per week or faster,” says Corvus co-founder and CTO Mohammed Kabir ’21. “There’s an enormous operational efficiency you gain from that.”
Corvus is already helping distributors, logistics providers, manufacturers, and grocers track their inventory. Through that work, the corporate has helped customers realize huge gains within the efficiency and speed of their warehouses.
The important thing to Corvus’s success has been constructing a drone platform that may operate autonomously in tough environments like warehouses, where GPS doesn’t work and Wi-Fi could also be weak, by only using cameras and neural networks to navigate. With that capability, the corporate believes its drones are poised to enable a brand new level of precision for the best way products are produced and stored in warehouses around the globe.
A brand new form of inventory management solution
Kabir has been working on drones since he was 14.
“I used to be inquisitive about drones before the drone industry even existed,” Kabir says. “I’d work with people I discovered on the web. On the time, it was only a bunch of hobbyists cobbling things together to see if they may work.”
In 2017, the identical yr Kabir got here to MIT, he received a message from his eventual 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 GPS-denied environments as a part of an open-source drone project. The scholars decided to see if they may use the work as the inspiration for an organization.
Kabir began working on spare nights and weekends as he juggled constructing Corvus’ technology together with his coursework in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. The founders initially tried using off-the-shelf drones and equipping them with sensors and computing power. Eventually they realized they’d to design their drones from scratch, because off-the-shelf drones didn’t provide the form of low-level control and access they needed to construct full-lifecycle autonomy.
Kabir built the primary drone prototype in his dorm room in Simmons Hall and took to flying each recent iteration in the sector out front.
“We’d construct these drone prototypes and produce them out to see in the event that they’d even fly, and then we’d return inside and begin constructing our autonomy systems on top of them,” Kabir recalls.
While working on Corvus, Kabir was also one among the founders of the MIT Driverless program that built North America’s first competition-winning driverless race cars.
“It’s all a part of the identical autonomy story,” Kabir says. “I’ve all the time been very inquisitive about constructing robots that operate with no human touch.”
From the start, the founders believed 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 racks and boxes to refine their technology.
By the point Kabir graduated in 2021, Corvus had accomplished several pilots with customers. One customer was MSI, a constructing materials company that distributes flooring, countertops, tile, and more. Soon MSI was using Corvus daily across multiple facilities in its nationwide network.
The Corvus One drone, which the corporate calls the world’s first fully autonomous warehouse inventory management drone, is provided with 14 cameras and an AI system that permits it to securely navigate to scan barcodes and record the placement of every product. In most instances, the collected data are shared with the shopper’s warehouse management system (typically the warehouse’s system of record), and any discrepancies identified are routinely categorized with a suggested resolution. Moreover, the Corvus interface allows customers to pick out no-fly zones, select flight behaviors, and set automated flight schedules.
“After we began, we didn’t know if lifelong vision-based autonomy in warehouses was even possible,” Kabir says. “It seems that it’s really hard to make infrastructure-free autonomy work with traditional computer vision techniques. We were the primary on this planet to ship a learning-based autonomy stack for an indoor aerial robot using machine learning and neural network based approaches. We were using AI before it was cool.”
To establish, Corvus’ team simply installs a number of docks, which act as a charging and data transfer station, on the ends of product racks and completes a rough mapping step using tape measurers. The drones then fill within the superb details on their very own. Kabir says it takes about per week to be fully operational in a 1-million-square-foot facility.
“We don’t need to arrange any stickers, reflectors, or beacons,” Kabir says. “Our setup is absolutely fast in comparison with other options within the industry. We call it infrastructure-free autonomy, and it’s an enormous differentiator for us.”
From forklifts to drones
Quite a lot of inventory management today is finished by an individual using a forklift or a scissor lift to scan barcodes and make notes on a clipboard. The result’s infrequent and inaccurate inventory checks that sometimes require warehouses to shut down operations.
“They’re going up and down on these lifts, and there are all of those manual steps involved,” Kabir says. “You could have to manually collect data, then there’s an information entry step, because none of those systems are connected. What we’ve found is many warehouses are driven by bad data, and there’s no option to fix that unless you fix the information you’re collecting in the primary place.”
Corvus can bring inventory management systems and processes together. Its drones also operate safely around people and forklifts daily.
“That was a core goal for us,” Kabir says. “After we go right into a warehouse, it’s a privilege the shopper has given us. We don’t need to disrupt their operations, and we construct a system around that concept. You may fly it each time it’s essential to, and the system will work around your schedule.”
Kabir already believes Corvus offers probably the most comprehensive inventory management solution available. Moving forward, the corporate will offer more end-to-end solutions to administer inventory the moment it arrives at warehouses.
“Drones actually only solve a component of the inventory problem,” Kabir says. “Drones fly around to trace rack pallet inventory, but numerous stuff gets lost even before it makes it to the racks. Products arrive, they get taken off a truck, after which they’re stacked on the ground, and before they’re moved to the racks, items have been lost. They’re mislabelled, they’re misplaced, they usually’re just gone. Our vision is to resolve that.”
