Digital Event Horizon
Corvus Robotics, a startup founded by Mohammed Kabir '21, has developed an autonomous drone technology that can track warehouse inventories with unprecedented precision, providing a significant boost to operational efficiency and speed.
Corvus Robotics uses autonomous drone technology to track and manage inventory in warehouses worldwide. The company's flagship product, Corvus One, is equipped with 14 cameras and an AI system for safe navigation and barcode scanning. Corvus aims to solve the problem of lost or misplaced inventory by enabling real-time tracking and management. The technology can operate 24/7 in GPS-denied environments, providing unprecedented views of products. The company has helped distributors, logistics providers, manufacturers, and grocers improve warehouse efficiency and speed.
Corvus Robotics, a startup founded by Mohammed Kabir '21, has been working on an innovative solution to address the problem of lost inventory in warehouses. With its cutting-edge autonomous drone technology, Corvus is poised to revolutionize the way products are tracked and managed in warehouses around the world.
The company's flagship product, the Corvus One drone, is equipped with 14 cameras and an AI system that allows it to safely navigate through GPS-denied environments and scan barcodes alongside human workers. This technology enables the drones to work 24/7, whether warehouse lights are on or off, providing an unprecedented view of products.
According to Kabir, the company's vision is to solve the problem of lost inventory, which is a major issue in warehouses worldwide. "Typically, warehouses will do inventory twice a year - we change that to once a week or faster," he says. "There's a huge operational efficiency you gain from that."
Corvus has already helped distributors, logistics providers, manufacturers, and grocers track their inventory, realizing significant gains in the efficiency and speed of their warehouses. The company's technology can bring inventory management systems and processes together, operating safely around people and forklifts every day.
The key to Corvus's success lies in its ability to operate autonomously in tough environments like warehouses, where GPS doesn't work and Wi-Fi may be weak, by only using cameras and neural networks to navigate. With this capability, the company believes its drones are poised to enable a new level of precision for the way products are produced and stored in warehouses around the world.
Kabir has been working on drones since he was 14 and began his journey at MIT's Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. He received a message from his eventual Corvus co-founder Jackie Wu, who saw some of Kabir's work on drone navigation in GPS-denied environments as part of an open-source drone project. The students decided to use the work as the foundation for a company.
The founders initially tried using off-the-shelf drones and equipping them with sensors and computing power. Eventually, they realized they had to design their drones from scratch because off-the-shelf drones did not provide the kind of low-level control and access they needed to build full-lifecycle autonomy.
Kabir built the first drone prototype in his dorm room in Simmons Hall and took to flying each new iteration in the field out front. "We'd build these drone prototypes and bring them out to see if they'd even fly, and then we'd go back inside and start building our autonomy systems on top of them," he recalls.
While working on Corvus, Kabir was also one of the founders of the MIT Driverless program that built North America's first competition-winning driverless race cars. "It's all part of the same autonomy story," Kabir says. "I've always been very interested in building robots that operate without a human touch."
The company has completed several pilots with customers, including MSI, a building materials company that distributes flooring, countertops, tile, and more. Soon MSI was using Corvus every day across multiple facilities in its nationwide network.
Corvus is addressing the problem of lost inventory in warehouses by developing an inventory management platform that uses autonomous drones to scan towering rows of pallets. The company's vision is to solve the problem of lost or misplaced inventory, which is a major issue in warehouses worldwide. With its innovative solution, Corvus is poised to revolutionize the way products are tracked and managed in warehouses around the world.
Related Information:
https://news.mit.edu/2024/corvus-autonomous-drones-precisely-track-warehouse-inventories-1220
Published: Thu Dec 19 23:28:17 2024 by llama3.2 3B Q4_K_M