Testing had been prepared since this spring and was finished by commercial use in the September. The results confirmed original expectations of high efficiency od drones in inventory process. It proved 80% financial and time savings compared to standard procedures and 100% precision of gained data.
The supplier of the technology for experimental use of autonomuos drone was company Neurospace. The standard inventory of 8000 palet places took two working days (two shifts a day) and 22 people worked with all the necessary equipment. The autonomuos drone shortened the same inventory to only six hours with assistance of two workers mainly for work safety. The results of drone inventory reached 100% accuracy. It also proved positive effect on work safety. The drone is fully autonomuos without necessity of pilot control. It decreases dangerous work of workers checking high positions of racks. It eliminates also costs of extra use of forklift trucks and for overtime of employees concerned and costs of special training for work safety. According to Mr. Rafał Łuczak, IT & Implementation Manager of ESA logistika: „The great advantage is that programmed drone is able of independent flights in the night, during the weekends or holidays even during the process of moving goods to the warehouse and to report registered data at the same time.“ The drone sends registered data to excel tables or it can send directly to WMS.
The autonomuos drone also eliminated possibility of human error factor to a great extent and also at the same time it enables space for checking if necessary. In this kind of inventory it is not necessary to use external workers and it is also means higher data security. In case of missing labels on scanned goods the drone takes photos of the goods from more positions and tries to indetify the goods on its own. If it fails to do this the drone sends the photos to operator who indetifies these items. This feature obviously inreases the flexibility of inventory process.
