Warehouse 4.0: Smart tech brings transparency to global supply chain

Eye, robot

High-tech shades and robots with wheels firmly on the ground can play an important role in Warehouse 4.0 efficiency, but what about those other remotely operated media darlings of the tech world, unmanned aerial vehicles? These UAVs, or drones, are known for their many last-mile parcel delivery stunts and James Bond-era panache, but they also face numerous practical hurdles before they can take off. Drones may not be allowed to fly beyond the line of sight of the drone pilot outside, but those flight restrictions do not apply for indoor use, said Matt McLelland, innovation research manager for Chattanooga-based 3PL Kenco Group.

So what can one do inside the warehouse with a drone? “Simply put, not much,” McLelland admitted. “We use them for inspection. We have a 40-foot-high rack and we’ll send one to the top and look around instead of using a scissor lift.” Other tasks that a drone can help with include scanning for inventory, checking dock doors and inspecting the facility’s solar panels outside, around the 45-acre property (see photo at right).

“We’ve kind of fallen in love with drones and their potential, and we haven’t really fallen in love with the problems that they were designed to solve,” he said. “For a drone to know where it is inside a warehouse right now is almost impossible, because GPS doesn’t work indoors.”

Still, McLelland has embraced the technology’s potential and continues to find creative uses for Kenco’s quadcopter. Kenco is now working with a company called Pinc, which uses drones as a yard management system to ensure that the facility’s trailers are in the correct spaces. “They’ve put an RFID scanner on the front of the drone,” McLelland said. “It goes up to about 25 feet, and it flies in a programmed grid around the top of the trucks and scans them for these RFID tags, and updates its cloud-based system in real time.”

One of the largest integrators, UPS, also has a strong interest in drones for warehouse use. The UPS Strategic Enterprise Fund, the private-equity strategic investment arm of UPS, invested in a drone startup in Boston called CyPhy Works to gather information about capabilities. While many of UPS’s planned uses for CyPhy involve last-mile delivery, the integrator has been testing drones inside UPS facilities to check high storage racks and confirm stock, or available space. “Our initial tests show that drones can be successfully used to complement UPS internal staff for warehouse and facility inspection activities,” said Rimas Kapeskas, managing director of the UPS Strategic Enterprise Fund.

French forwarder GEODIS has also experimented with drone technology in a warehouse setting, recently completing a pilot project with UAV-maker Delta Drone at warehouse facilities in Saint-Ouen-l’Aumône, near Paris, and Plaisance-du-Touch, outside Toulouse.In this “initial development phase,” GEODIS said the prototype Delta quadcopter model “demonstrated all the potential of the developed system,” which will be used to track inventory in the warehouses. The quadcopter, equipped with high-resolution cameras and a ground-based robot with a battery that powered the system, was able to identify pallets in hard-to-reach areas under low-light conditions. The entire system, featuring indoor geolocation technology, functions with complete autonomy during the hours when the site is closed.

The system, which ensures data counting and reporting in real time, aims to integrate the entire value chain, including data processing and retrieval in the warehouses’ WMS. The final delivery of a prototype is planned for first-quarter 2017.