By Craig Dowley
The concept of using warehouse drones to perform warehouse inventory cycle counting is becoming more mainstream. Tradeshow exhibits and online videos of drones zipping around warehouses have successfully planted the seed in the minds of supply chain leaders. But questions linger. Are warehouse drones everything they have purported to be?
Replacing expensive and hard to source labor with autonomous flying scanning robots is extremely enticing. Before considering these UAVs, read these top 10 Things You Need to Know based on the experiences of the company that flew more warehouse drone missions in North America from 2018-2022. These 10 helpful facts are not specific to one solution provider or type of drone, but instead are general technology limitations and process requirements inherent in all cycle counting warehouse drones.
#1 Keep Aisles Clear of Any Day to Day Obstacles
Warehouse drones are programmed to fly pre-determined flights to ensure they cover the appropriate rack shelves. Regardless of what gets in their way, the drones will attempt to successfully complete their missions. This means warehouse associates need to continually ensure that aisles are cleared of any day-to-day MHE, floor placed pallets, signage, or people. As a result, it’s very difficult to operate drones side by side with Associates in the aisles. This shortcoming was a leading factor in the development of the StorTRACK vision system, which is a safer, faster, and more efficient alternative to warehouse drones. StorTRACK from Vimaan truly works alongside existing processes, Associates, and does not require hours of prep work to execute cycle count missions.
#2 Warehouse Drones Are Easily Disabled
In addition to obstacle free aisles, associates need to keep shelves free of typical warehouse debris that can disable drones. Due to their low field of view (FOV) and the need to generate high resolution scans, drones need to hover closely near inventory. During this process, warehouse drones create powerful updrafts and inhale any packing material into their rotors. Loose materials including packing tape and shrink wrap are easily sucked in. All it takes is a few seconds of hover time for a drone to ingest these materials, when this happens the drone rotors become entangled, and the UAV is disabled. This is why drone solution providers inform warehouses that their shelves need to be pristine before drones take flight. This extra work of cleaning shelves and clearing aisles reduces the “autonomous” nature of warehouse drone cycle counting missions.
This video shows what can happen when a warehouse drone comes in contact with packing materials.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mJa_GIVc2s
#3 Short Lasting Battery Charges Impact Cycle Count Productivity
All warehouse drones experience the same limitation of very short battery charges. On average drone charges do not last longer than 20 minutes. However, this does not equate to 20 minutes of continuous cycle counting. Drones need to return to their base stations before they run of our power, otherwise they will drop to the warehouse ground subject to being crushed by oncoming forklifts. Vimaan understands warehouses require uninterrupted cycle counting so the solution provider engineered StorTRACK to last up to 8 hours before a new charge is required.
StorTRACK is 10-20X faster than drones and manual cycle counting
#4 Limited Field of Views
Maximizing flight time requires that drones carry a limited payload. This includes limiting the weight of batteries and cameras carried by the drone. While this reduces the weight, it also reduces the efficacy of the equipment. Drone battery lives are short and field of views are small. The smaller the field of view (FOV), the longer the flight time required to satisfactorily capture inventory, especially when the bins are filled with multiple items that need scanning. Alternatively, Vimaan has built StorTRACK with 4 inventory capturing cameras that can capture inventory as fast as your MHE can raise and lower its forks. Making it ideal for densely packed bins.
#5 Drones that only scan barcodes are only capturing half the picture
Most complete cycle count missions require more than just a barcode scan, but often that’s only what a warehouse drone can do. If warehouses are hoping to
capture inventory quantities, read label text, identify missing labels, inspect for damages, or identify open bins, a flying barcode scanner won’t help. To accomplish these tasks, StorTRACK operates from AI-enabled computer vision that can capture the shelf surroundings, read text, count cases, and provide a more complete view of your inventory and storage space.
#6 Warehouse drones require more labor than originally promised
The promise of “100% autonomous” cycle counting that warehouse drones were supposed to provide does not match with reality. Drones can effectively scan codes from your lowest to the highest shelves, but new labor required tasks have surfaced that include looking after drones, changing batteries, cleaning shelves, and preparing for their missions. From changing battery packs to clearing shelves of debris, there is plenty for your workers to do to ensure drones stay in the air and on task. StorTRACK from Vimaan requires only a single MHE operator and that’s it. Your workers do not have to worry about charging batteries every 20 minutes or clearing aisles. StorTRACK easily works alongside your teams and does not require any changes to existing workflows or processes. Customers have reduced their cycle count labor requirement by over 75%, allowing them to achieve ROI in as little as 8 months.
#7 Set up time for warehouse drones is extensive
Like many AMRs, warehosue drones require barcode stickers to help them navigate warehouses. But instead of placing stickers on the floor for AMRs, the stickers need to be placed on every rack and every shelf in your warehouse! This amounts to thousands of stickers being placed. Meanwhile StorTRACK just needs stickers at the bottom of your uprights to know where it is. This makes set up time with StorTRACK significantly faster than even the the quickest drone install.
#8 Warehouse Drones Are Not Cheap
If warehouses are looking for a quick ROI with drones, they quickly discover that’s not necessarily achievable. The extensive set up time, installation and integration efforts result in high costs that are passed along to the warehouse. The latest field data has shown that drone installations cost more than double than it would for StorTRACK. Most StorTRACK customers realize an ROI with the computer vision system in less than a year!
#9 Slow cycle counting due to technology limitations
Most of us have seen all the online videos of drones zipping around warehouses. Those drones are not scanning or capturing inventory. While drones can reach higher than your workers, they are not much faster. Due to their small FOV and need to capture high resolution images, drones need to be slow and methodical when scanning inventory. As mentioned, StorTRACK scans as fast as your MHE can lift and lower its forks!
Warehouses are inhospitable environments for drones.
#10 More exaggeration than innovation
Using drones to fly around the warehouse to scan inventory sounds extremely cool and may excite executives, investors, customers and even the press. But the reality is that warehouses are inhospitable environments for drones. The technology is better suited for short flights and scenic outdoor video capture, not methodical and lengthy inventory documentation. Warehouses that have deployed drones encounter a whole new set of challenges at high costs and lessons learned.
Overall, the idea of using warehouse drones for cycle counting was sound, but unfortunately what looks good on paper doesn’t always work out as expected. The learnings of deploying more drone installations than any other North American solution providers has steered Vimaan to a faster, more reliable, and cost-effective cycle counting solution in StorTRACK. Using this new MHE handled vision system, warehouses are reducing their headcount and achieving targeted ROI in under a year.
To learn more about effective cycle count automation, visit: www.vimaan.ai
