BY BEN AMES, SENIOR EDITOR
DATA CAPTURE
Technology
WAREHOUSES ARE NOISY PLACES, WITH CONVEYors, cranes, and forklifts shuttling items, cases, and pallets
in and out of storage. But the next time you hear a persistent buzz in a busy DC, look up—the sound may not be
coming from the material handling equipment, but from a
flying drone.
Drones used in logistics usually make the headlines
only when they involve deliveries to consumers. Recent
examples include Amazon Prime Air’s delivery of a bottle
of sunscreen to an Amazon-hosted conference in Palm
Springs, Calif., and the dropoff of an Amazon Fire streaming device and bag of popcorn to a residence in the British
countryside. UPS Inc. also made the news when it whisked
an asthma inhaler to an island in Boston Harbor, as did
Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company, when it (literally)
dropped off burritos from a Chipotle restaurant to hungry
students at Virginia Tech’s Blacksburg campus.
Despite those high-profile successes, parcel delivery
drones face many hurdles before they can transition from
trials to widespread use. Limits on battery life and payload
weight still restrict the distance they can travel and the size
of the packages they can carry. Strict government regulations and public safety concerns have made many companies wary of investing in broader drone programs until the
picture clears up.
In the meantime, some see a very different future for
drones in logistics—one where the flying bots are used for
collecting data instead of delivering parcels. Attach a small
camera to a drone and it can send wireless video back to
users, allowing them to count inventory, patrol boundaries,
or locate trucks.
Without the burden of a payload, the lightweight drones
can hover for hours over small areas like truck yards or
inside giant warehouses, proponents say. And by avoiding
flights that cross public roads and buildings, drones can
dodge many of the toughest safety restrictions that now
inhibit their use (such as rules requiring them to stay in
sight of a human pilot and to avoid private property).
VIEW FROM ON HIGH
Transportation and logistics giant UPS Inc. has already run
trials that involve flying drones inside its DCs. The airborne
vehicles can perform inventory counts in cavernous warehouses faster than a worker could on foot, and they can verify the quantity or identity of goods on high shelves without
the safety risks that come with sending an employee up on
an elevated platform, a UPS spokesman said.
Retail powerhouse Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has also been
experimenting with indoor drones. It recently applied for
a U.S. patent on a system that would leverage both their
data collection and delivery capabilities by using drones
to locate and drop off merchandise within its giant retail
stores, a company spokesman confirmed. Intended to cut
the amount of time customers spend waiting for their
goods, Wal-Mart’s patent application describes a process in
which a store employee would dispatch an airborne drone
to fetch an item located within that store and bring it to a
waiting customer. To avoid having drones flying over the
heads of nervous shoppers, the system would configure the
flight path so the bots fly over shelves, not aisles.
Drones prepare to
swarm the DC
Drones prepare to
swarm the DC
The hype is all about package delivery. But some visionary companies have been
quietly putting drones to work in the warehouse—with impressive results.
