Using a drone to scan barcodes in high warehouses saves hundreds of man-hours during stock-take or physical inventory. The drone flys up to the high shelves and scans the barcodes on each item, as well as the barcode on the shelf. This saves the time and effort of lifting a human up to the high shelves using a forklift or reach truck which can be as high as 8m. There are huge savings to be made in
reducing the effort of manual barcode scanning of high shelves which is both time consuming, dangerous, and energy inefficient. The DroneScan Airborne data collection system uses the latest drone platforms, hardware, software, scanning and communications technology to provide robotic scanning solutions of high shelves in large uniform warehouses. The barcode or RFID reader equiped drones have on-board sensors to keep them within optimal scanning range from the racks and pallets in the warehouse while they scan the item and shelf barcodes. Sensors on the drone provide information to the on-board flight controller to keep it at the correct height to scan the rack and pallet item barcodes in the warehouse. The height of the drone is communicated over a wireless link from the server which uses a database to process the scanned barcodes and send commands to the drone, while building up a list of items scanned in the inventory.
