Warehouse Drone

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I am looking to add a drone that has autopilot capability to my warehouse.

The idea is for it to have a set path that takes pictures at various heights of our warehouse shelves to catalog our inventory.

I have about 54 inches of space between each rack and I'm wondering what type of drone would be best for this or if the phantom drone could do this?
 
I believe i have heard of people using the skydio 2 for this. May wanna check them out. Be safe !
 
The biggest problem that will need to be solved is the very weak GPS signals inside most structures. For the most part, they are not adequate to provide reliable location information.

The other locating method relies on image pattern recognition using the image sensors on the drone. This is, thus far, much slower and less accurate. It relies on stable image patterns for the drone to see.
 
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The biggest problem that will need to be solved is the very weak GPS signals inside most structures. For the most part, they are not adequate to provide reliable location information.

The other locating method relies on image pattern recognition using the image sensors on the drone. This is, thus far, much slower and less accurate. It relies on stable image patterns for the drone to see.

Nothing DJI has will come close to being adequate for this application.

Check out the Elios 2 mentioned above. It doesn't use GPS and is designed to fly in confined spaces. Very high tech.................

But, selling for 38,000 CHF (Swiss Francs) or $41,779.56 US, it darn should do all that............AND fix your dinner.....all at the same time. [emoji12]
 
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Nothing DJI has will come close to being adequate for this application.

Check out the Elios 2 mentioned above. It doesn't use GPS and is designed to fly in confined spaces. Very high tech.................

But, selling for 38,000 CHF (Swiss Francs) or $41,779.56 US, it darn should do all that............AND fix your dinner.....all at the same time. [emoji12]
Just pay me $40,000 even and I'll take the photos manually. LOL
 
There are a number of people working on this use case & I can tell you that none of them are going to share their intellectual property at this time. The big barrier is gps signals indoors. You won’t get weak gps signals, you’ll get no gps signal in the warehouse. That leaves you with expensive positioning options.
The easy answer to your question is There are no drones available to do what you want. As I have to keep telling my teams. Run these flights manually for now & we’ll automate when the equipment & pricing are in line with our needs.
 
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I am looking to add a drone that has autopilot capability to my warehouse.

The idea is for it to have a set path that takes pictures at various heights of our warehouse shelves to catalog our inventory.

I have about 54 inches of space between each rack and I'm wondering what type of drone would be best for this or if the phantom drone could do this?

All kidding aside, what you want is really not feasible. GPS for all intent and purposes is basically line of sight. No LOS; no signal. The vision positioning system available on some aircraft is inadequate (and unreliable) for the task. That leaves you with piloting the aircraft manually with none of the safety features available. Unless you have extensive experience flying manually, then this is an accident waiting to happen. The confined spaces you described are not ideal for operating a drone manually. You would be better served taking the images with a handheld camera at this time. Not what you were wanting to hear, but that is it in a nutshell.
 
I am looking to add a drone that has autopilot capability to my warehouse.

The idea is for it to have a set path that takes pictures at various heights of our warehouse shelves to catalog our inventory.

I have about 54 inches of space between each rack and I'm wondering what type of drone would be best for this or if the phantom drone could do this?

A flying drone is not as likely to work as well as an autonomous robot, for which there are commercial options you can find with Google. The robot and your warehouse may need to be customized. For example, Walmart currently has robots cleaning and sanitizing shelves in some of its stores during normal business hours. Look for stores with OR placards on pillars that the robots use to help navigate.

An important consideration is drones and robots are reasonably good at collecting photos or videos; i.e., “data“ but data is useless by itself without interpretation, which is an inventory in your case. So, you either need to include a human to look at the data (each photo or video) to take the inventory, include an AI (artificial intelligence) in the process, or include visible bar codes or similar machine readable labels that are visible to the robot on each item the needs counted.

An easier solution would be to put RFI tags on everything that needs tracked. The tags can be read with a device as you walk by. Each item would need to be tagged, each tag would have a unique number, and each item/tag entered into a database. There are commercial solutions and experts available for this approach and many warehouses already use it. Check out websites like the following:


Save the drone for taking aerial photos of the entire warehouse.

Funny story - I’ve done hazardous materials surveys of big box store distribution centers (nearly one mile on a side) and super centers. After doing half a dozen one day, I walked into the last super center at about 9pm and was so tired and the store looked so big, that I thought that I could see the curvature of the earth as I looked toward the back of the store and contemplated everything I needed to do before calling it a day. It was funny at the time, but I‘m sure I was delirious with fatigue.

Look into RFI tag solutions, and good luck.
 
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Depends on what type of inventory you are tracking, but putting RFID tags, as Earthman suggested, will work very well if you are tagging individual items, cases or pallets.
 
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