Whether you are a fulfillment center, manufacturer or distributor, speed is key. But getting products out quickly requires workers to always know where those products are in their warehouses. It may seem obvious, but lost or misplaced inventory is a major problem in warehouses around the world.
Corvus Robotics is addressing that problem with an inventory management platform that uses autonomous drones to scan the towering rows of pallets that fill most warehouses. The company's drones can operate 24/7 whether the warehouse lights are on or off, scanning barcodes alongside human workers to give them an unprecedented view of their products. .
“Warehouses typically take inventory twice a year; we've changed that to once a week or faster,” says Corvus co-founder and CTO Mohammed Kabir '21. “You get enormous operational efficiency from that.”
Corvus is already helping distributors, logistics providers, manufacturers and grocers keep track of their inventory. Through that work, the company has helped clients realize huge gains in the efficiency and speed of their warehouses.
The key to Corvus' success has been building a drone platform that can operate autonomously in difficult environments like warehouses, where GPS doesn't work and Wi-Fi can be weak, using only cameras and neural networks to navigate. With that capability, the company believes its drones are poised to enable a new level of precision in the way products are produced and stored in warehouses around the world.
A new type of inventory management solution
Kabir has been working with drones since he was 14 years old.
“I was interested in drones even before the drone industry existed,” Kabir says. “I would work with people I found on the Internet. At that time, they were just a bunch of amateurs improvising things to see if they could work.”
In 2017, the same year Kabir arrived at MIT, he received a message from his eventual Corvus co-founder, Jackie Wu, who at the time was a student at Northwestern University. Wu had seen some of Kabir's work on drone navigation in non-GPS environments as part of an open source drone project. The students decided to see if they could use the work as a basis for a company.
Kabir began working on free nights and weekends while juggling building the Corvus technology with his courses at MIT's Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Initially, the founders tried to use commercially available drones and equip them with sensors and computing power. Over time, they realized they had to design their drones from scratch, because commercially available drones did not provide the type of low-level control and access they needed to develop full lifecycle autonomy.
Kabir built the first drone prototype in his dorm room at Simmons Hall and began flying each new iteration in the field across the street.
“We would build these prototype drones and take them out to see if they could even fly, and then we would go back inside and start building our autonomy systems on top of them,” Kabir remembers.
While working at Corvus, Kabir was also one of the founders of MIT's Driverless program that built the first competition-winning driverless racing cars in North America.
“It's all part of the same story of autonomy,” Kabir says. “I've always been very interested in building robots that work without human contact.”
From the beginning, the founders believed that inventory management was a promising application for their drone technology. Finally, 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 was MSI, a building materials company that distributes flooring, countertops, tiles and more. Soon, MSI was using Corvus every day at multiple installations across its nationwide network.
The Corvus One drone, which the company calls the world's first fully autonomous warehouse inventory management drone, is equipped with 14 cameras and an artificial intelligence system that allows it to safely navigate to scan barcodes and record location of each product. In most cases, the collected data is shared with the customer's warehouse management system (typically the warehouse record system) and any identified discrepancies are automatically triaged with a suggested solution. Additionally, the Corvus interface allows customers to select no-fly zones, choose flight behaviors, and set automated flight schedules.
“When we started, we didn't know if lifelong vision-based autonomy was possible in warehouses,” Kabir says. “It turns out that it is really difficult to make infrastructure-free autonomy work with traditional computer vision techniques. We were the first in the world 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 set it up, the Corvus team simply installs one or more bases, which act as a charging and data transfer station, at the ends of the product shelves and completes a rough mapping step using measuring tapes. The drones then fill in the fine details on their own. Kabir says it takes about a week to be fully operational at a 1 million square foot facility.
“We don't have to put up stickers, reflectors or beacons,” says Kabir. “Our setup is really fast compared to other options in the industry. We call it autonomy without infrastructure and it is a great differentiator for us.”
From forklifts to drones
Today, much of inventory management is done by a person using a forklift or scissor lift to scan barcodes and make notes on a clipboard. The result is infrequent and inaccurate inventory checks that sometimes require warehouses to shut down operations.
“They go up and down in these elevators, and there are all these manual steps involved,” Kabir says. “You have to collect data manually and then there is a data entry step, because none of these systems are connected. What we've found is that many warehouses are running on bad data and there's no way to fix it unless you fix the data you're collecting in the first place.”
Corvus can bring together inventory management systems and processes. Their drones also operate safely around people and forklifts every day.
“That was a key goal for us,” says Kabir. “When we enter a warehouse, it is a privilege that the customer has given us. We don't want to disrupt their operations and we built a system around that idea. You can fly it when you need it and the system will adapt to your schedule.”
Kabir already believes that Corvus offers the most comprehensive inventory management solution available. In the future, the company will offer more end-to-end solutions to manage inventory as it reaches warehouses.
“Drones actually only solve part of the inventory problem,” Kabir says. “Drones fly to track pallet inventory on shelves, but many things are lost before they even reach the shelves. The products arrive, they are taken off a truck, then they are stacked on the floor and before they go to the shelves, the items have been lost. They are mislabeled, misplaced, and simply disappeared. Our vision is to solve that.”
