Introduction to Warehouse Drones - Everything you need to know about flying drones in warehouses

This introduction to warehouse drone succinctly sums up how these flying vehicles operate in warehouses and distribution centers. Consider this your Warehouse Drones 101 that presents the features, benefits and even challenges of deploying drones in the warehouse. Warehouse drones are used to help enhance cycle counting activities in the warehouse. Inventory accuracy is a critical component to managing a warehouse, and historically is very labor intensive. As fulfillment demands have increased, warehouses are forced to carry large amounts of inventory. Unfortunately warehouses have limited footprints and instead of spreading out their operation, they have embraced high vertical storage shelves for their inventory. While this helps solve the storage challenges, this has impacted the ability for warehouse workers to appropriately cycle count inventory which entails scanning stored goods. This was a driving factor to introducing warehouse drones as a means of scanning both high and low locations of stored goods.

Warehouse drones can reach the highest stored goods in the warehouse, keeping employees safe on the ground. This technology was introduced in the late 2010's and has intrigued warehouse professionals as a potential approach to help automate their cycle count processes. Regardless of the supplier warehouse drones possess on average a battery life of 20 minutes, and then it must return to the charging stations or an employee will manually swap out the drone batteries. Suppliers will suggest deploying multiple warehouse drones to ensure constant scanning. Managing multiple warehouse drones will require additional headcount to serve as air traffic controllers and often times serve as the pilot of these flying barcode scanners. Warehouse drones also come equipped with their own lights and a single camera/scanner. The single cameras provide approximately a one foot field of view/scanning area. These one foot field of views will require warehouse drones to slowly fly and stop in front of inventory to ensure the barcodes are capture.

Warehouse drones are certainly a step up over manual hand scanning of inventory especially for the higher shelves. A warehouse drone can successfully scan a 300 foot long by 30 feet high warehouse aisle in just over 5 hours, which is almost twice as fast manual cycle counting. However this 5 hours does not include the time required for warehouse drones to be charged every 20 minutes. Warehouses deploying drones will also need to clear their aisles of workers or any equipment since it may serve as a safely risk for all. Additionally, due ot the powerful drafts created by warehouse drones, workers need to ensure all shelves are clean and free of any loose shrink wrap, packing tape and other loose materials. A common situation warehouses find is that drones become disabled due to inhaling plastic wrap. When this happens the warehouse drone will continue to try and break free of the material until its battery dies or a warehouse worker goes up to retrieve it. Warehouses that deploy drones discover the benefits and challenges of the technology after the first few weeks of deploying.

To better understand if warehouse drones are a fit for you, ask the solution provider to provide a limited time trial or pilot of the technology. This will help ensure that warehouses understand how warehouse drones may interact with their unique environments. Warehouses that continue to use the drone technology discover that it can improve cycle counting speeds and potentially reduce required headcount. While the expectation is that warehouse drones will help reduce the number of employees, there are additional responsibilities and new duties that come with operating this technology. Warehouses will need to keep a close eye on the drones to ensure they dont get entangled, damaged or even risk the safety of employees. While warehouses that use drones discover that they can improve the speed of cycle counting, many also discover that the Vimaan StorTRACK computer vision solution is faster than warehouse drones, with a field of view 4X larger and a battery life of up to 8 hours, compared to 20 minutes for drones. Warehouse drones are intriguing and can serve as a demonstration of how warehouses are embracing innovation, if they are looking for ways to improve results and reduce headcount they will discover there are better options, such as StorTRACK.

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