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Due to the exponential growth of ecommerce, the need for automated Inventory management is crucial to have, among others, up-to-date information. There have been recent developments in using drones equipped with RGB cameras for scanning and counting inventories in warehouse. Due to their unlimited reach, agility and speed, drones can speed up the inventory process and keep it actual.
To benefit from this drone technology, warehouse owners and inventory service providers are actively exploring ways for maximizing the utilization of this technology through extending its capability in long-term autonomy, collaboration and operation in night and weekends. This feasibility study is aimed at investigating the possibility of developing a robust, reliable and resilient group of aerial robots with long-term autonomy as part of effectively automating warehouse inventory system to have competitive advantage in highly dynamic and competitive market. To that end, the main research question is,
“Which technologies need to be further developed to enable collaborative drones with long-term autonomy to conduct warehouse inventory at night and in the weekends?”
This research focusses on user requirement analysis, complete system architecting including functional decomposition, concept development, technology selection, proof-of-concept demonstrator development and compiling a follow-up projects.