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:
Don’t lose track of your assets. Warehouse Inventory solutions from ClearStream manages your inventory with RFID that track assets throughout your warehouse.
www.clearstreamrfid.com
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.