Efficient Warehouse Management with Autonomous Drones

Considering the rapid ascendancy of e-commerce, the logistics industry is facing highly unprecedented demand in its quest to increase efficiency, speed, and accuracy. Most conventional warehouse facilities that still rely on human aids, for example, physical inventory and parcels tracking, tend to be inefficient with locked up operational costs and risks such as lack of safety complying with today’s supply chain standards. In this paper, we propose a novel approach: the Warehouse Drone (WD), which is an autonomous quadcopter based automated warehousing logistics system that will be used to locate, recognize and handle the packages more accurately and intelligently. The system operates in a fully automated fashion, fitted within the warehouse environment, using techniques like computer vision, path planning, and scanning. Therefore, it can navigate, plan its route without collisions, and can also scan the positions and the states of the packages in real time. Built on a range of tools such as ROS2, OpenCV, Rivz2, and several others, the WD has the ability to interface with the central warehouse system, facilitating efficient warehouse operations by reducing the need for human interaction in repetitive processes as well as reducing errors after manual handling. In addition, the Warehouse Drone helps tackle significant issues faced in logistics by improving the accuracy of inventory management, operational efficiency, and safety. This paper includes the design of the WD, autonomous navigation approaches, and the use of drones within a warehouse in general.