Hangarwarehouse fleet.
A fleet of indoor-autonomous inventory drones for a 220k-sqft distribution centre. Visual-SLAM in GPS-denied aisles, barcode + OCR at fly-by speed, cycle counts in three hours.
Cycle count took
a full weekend. Every time.
The distribution centre ran cycle counts every quarter — closing the facility for a full weekend, pulling staff off regular operations, and scanning 28,000 pallet locations by hand. Errors crept in; discrepancies between the WMS and physical inventory cost the client $120k in write-offs the year before we started.
The brief: a fleet of autonomous drones that flies the aisles at night, reads barcodes and OCR labels at fly-by speed, and reconciles against the WMS without shutting the facility or touching a scanner.
Navigate by walls,
read every label.
Indoor Navigation
GPS is useless inside a steel-rack warehouse. Each drone builds and maintains a Visual-SLAM map using a downward stereo camera and rack-mounted AprilTag anchors for loop-closure corrections. A ROS 2 navigation stack handles path planning, obstacle avoidance for forklifts and personnel, and aisle-by-aisle task assignment across the fleet.
Drones operate at night between shifts, dock autonomously on charging pads between aisles, and hand off tasks when battery drops below threshold — no human intervention required after the evening launch.
Barcode & OCR at Speed
A high-speed global-shutter camera with a dedicated ring-light flash captures barcode and label images at fly-by speed — up to 1.8 m/s past a rack face. An on-board NVIDIA Jetson runs a custom YOLO detector to locate label regions, feeds them into Tesseract OCR with a WMS-vocabulary language model, and achieves 98% read accuracy without slowing down.
Results sync to the WMS in real-time over Wi-Fi. Discrepancies are flagged with location and confidence score for human review the next morning.
per hour.
accuracy.
manual count.
shutdowns.
Launch it at night,
read it by morning.
Fleet dashboard, SLAM map, live scan feed, WMS reconciliation, and discrepancy report — the full warehouse pipeline.
All drones, battery level, current aisle, and task queue.
Live SLAM map with drone positions and completed aisles.
Real-time barcode and OCR reads syncing to the WMS.
Scanned inventory vs WMS — discrepancies flagged instantly.
Location, label, and confidence score for every mismatch.