Whether you’re a fulfillment center, manufacturer, or distributor, speed is everything. But to get product out the door quickly, workers need to know where it is in the warehouse at all times. It may sound obvious, but lost or misplaced inventory is a major problem for warehouses around the world.
Corvus Robotics is solving this 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, regardless of whether warehouse lights are on or off, and scan barcodes right next to workers, providing unprecedented product views.
“Typically, warehouses process inventory twice a year, but we’re changing that to once a week or more,” says Mohammed Kabir ’21, Corvus co-founder and CTO. “This gives us tremendous operational efficiencies.”
Corvus is already helping distributors, logistics providers, manufacturers, and grocers track their inventory. Through these efforts, the company has helped its customers significantly increase the efficiency and speed of their warehouses.
The secret to Corvus’ success is building a drone platform that can operate autonomously, navigating using only cameras and neural networks, in harsh environments such as warehouses where GPS does not work and Wi-Fi is weak. With these capabilities, the company believes its drones are poised to enable a new level of precision in how products are produced and stored in warehouses around the world.
A new kind of inventory management solution
Kabir has been working with drones since he was 14 years old.
“I have been interested in drones since before the industry even existed,” says Kabir. “I worked with people I found on the Internet. “At that time, people with different hobbies gathered together to see if they could make a difference.”
In 2017, the same year Kabir came to MIT, he received a message from Corvus co-founder Jackie Wu, who was a student at Northwestern University at the time. Wu had seen some of Kabir’s work on drone navigation in GPS-denied environments as part of an open source drone project. The students decided to see if they could use this work as the basis for a company.
Kabir began working in his spare time and on weekends, building Corvus’ technology through coursework in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. The founders initially attempted to use off-the-shelf drones and equip them with sensors and computing power. Because off-the-shelf drones did not provide the low-level control and access needed to build full lifecycle autonomy, they eventually realized they would have to design a drone from scratch.
Kabir built the first drone prototype in his dorm room in Simmons Hall and flew each new iteration directly on site.
Kabir recalls: “We built these drone prototypes, took them to see if they could fly, and then went back inside and started building autonomous systems,” he recalls.
While working on Corvus, Kabir was also one of the founders of the MIT Driverless program, which created North America’s first competition-winning driverless race car.
“It’s all part of the same autonomy story,” says Kabir. “I’ve always been interested in building robots that operate without human touch.”
From the beginning, the founders believed that inventory management was a promising application for drone technology. They eventually leased a facility in Boston and simulated a warehouse with huge racks and boxes to improve their technology.
By the time Kabir graduates in 2021, Corvus has completed several pilots with customers. One customer was MSI, a building materials company that distributes flooring, countertops, and tile. Soon MSI was using Corvus daily at multiple facilities across its national network.
The Corvus One drone, the world’s first fully autonomous warehouse inventory management drone, is equipped with 14 cameras and an AI system that can scan barcodes and safely navigate the location of each product. In most cases, the data collected is shared with the customer’s warehouse management system (usually the warehouse’s system of record), and any discrepancies found are automatically sorted out with suggested solutions. The Corvus interface also allows customers to select no-fly zones, select flight behavior, and set automatic flight schedules.
“When we first started, we didn’t even know that lifetime vision-based autonomy was possible in a warehouse,” says Kabir. “It turns out that achieving infrastructure-free autonomy is really difficult with traditional computer vision techniques. We have launched the world’s first learning-based autonomy stack for indoor aerial robots using machine learning and neural network-based approaches. “We were using AI before it was introduced.”
To set up, the Corvus team installs one or more docks that act as charging and data transfer stations at the ends of product racks and completes rough mapping steps using a tape measure. The drone then fills in the fine details on its own. Kabir said it takes about a week for the 1 million-square-foot facility to become fully operational.
“There is no need to install stickers, reflectors or beacons,” says Kabir. “Our setup is really fast compared to other options in the industry. We call this autonomy without infrastructure, and it’s a big differentiator for us.”
From forklifts to drones
Much inventory management today is done by people using forklifts or scissor lifts to scan barcodes and take notes on clipboards. The result is infrequent and inaccurate inventory checks that sometimes require warehouse operations to be shut down.
“Going up and down this lift requires all manual steps,” says Kabir. “You have to collect data manually, and there are data entry steps. Because none of these systems are connected. “What we’ve discovered is that many warehouses are running on bad data, and there’s no way to fix it unless you fix the data you collect in the first place.”
Corvus can unify your inventory management systems and processes. Drones also operate safely around people and forklifts every day.
“This was our key goal,” says Kabir. “It is a privilege given to us by our customers to enter their warehouse. We don’t want to interfere with their operations and we build our system around that idea. You can fly whenever you need and the system works on schedule.”
Kabir already believes that Corvus offers the most comprehensive inventory management solution. In the future, the company will offer more end-to-end solutions to manage inventory from the moment it arrives at the warehouse.
“Drones really solve only part of the inventory problem,” says Kabir. “Drones fly around to track rack pallet inventory, but many items are lost before they even reach the racks. When products arrive, they are unloaded from trucks, piled on the floor, and lost before being moved to racks. It was mislabeled, misplaced, and just disappeared. Our vision is to solve this.”
