Inventory Drone: From Clipboards to ABB Warehouse Robots

A warehouse has to keep checking that what its computer says is on a shelf is really there. For decades that meant people with count sheets, then people with scanners on forklift platforms. An inventory drone does the same job from the air: it flies the aisles on its own, photographs each storage location and flags what does not match. This post follows stock counting from annual stocktakes and the first barcode scan in 1974 through RFID and Walmart's 2016 drone test to today's fleets from Corvus, Gather AI and Verity, and looks at how ABB's warehouse robots could work alongside them.

Tall racks of boxed goods in an IKEA warehouse, 2016. Photo: Maksym Kozlenko / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

How warehouses counted stock before drones

A full stocktake is often an intensive annual job at the end of the financial year. It is done for the company's accounts, often with external auditors present, and it can mean significant downtime for the warehouse. Many sites moved to cycle counting instead, checking some locations at a time throughout the year, which disrupts operations less but never really finishes. Either way, someone has to reach every location, read what is there and write it down or key it in, and a bigger warehouse simply means more of those trips.

Senior Airman Angele Caudle counts aircraft parts during inventory work at RAF Mildenhall, England, November 2023. Photo: Katie Mullikin / U.S. Air Force via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Barcodes sped up the reading. At 8:01 on the morning of 26 June 1974, a checkout at the Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio, scanned a 10-pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit gum, the first UPC-marked item read at a retail checkout. IBM engineer George Laurer had designed the symbol. Radio tags came from another direction. Mario Cardullo patented a passive transponder with memory on 23 January 1973, after demonstrating it to the New York Port Authority as a toll device. Warehouse systems now use RFID to speed up receiving and shipping, and retailers use it to tag individual items.

A Decathlon T-shirt label with a barcode and, lit from behind, the antenna of its sewn-in RFID tag. Photo: Boevaya mashina / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Scanners still needed a person in front of every label. At Walmart's distribution centre in Bentonville, Arkansas, workers were harnessed to forklifts to scan boxes stacked three storeys high, and checking the whole building took about a month. In June 2016 Walmart showed a drone that hovered along the racks and could do the same check in 24 hours, marking each spot green, blue or red. A year later MIT researchers made drones relay RFID signals, locating tags to about 19 centimetres, and noted that Walmart had reported losing $3 billion in revenue in 2013 to mismatches between its records and its stock.

An employee takes inventory with a barcode scanner at the FEMA Logistics Center warehouse in Fort Worth, Texas, 2006. Photo: Liz Roll / FEMA via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Inventory drones in warehouses in 2026

At IKEA the idea grew quickly. Its first drone, developed with Verity, took off in IKEA Switzerland in 2021. By March 2023 there were 100 drones at 16 locations in seven countries, flying while stores were closed, so co-workers no longer had to confirm each pallet by hand. By August 2024 IKEA counted more than 250 drones at 73 locations in nine countries, working around the clock alongside staff. The drones fly pre-scheduled routes up to storage level 3 and above, reroute around obstacles and use an AI algorithm to identify and photograph each storage location.

The warehouse of the IKEA store in Vaughan, Ontario, 2013. Photo: Oaktree b / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.5 CA)

In the US, Corvus Robotics said in August 2026 that it had raised $20 million, bringing its total to $38 million, and named co-founder Mohammed Kabir chief executive. It has deployed more than 300 inventory drones across 26 US states, Canada and Mexico, including over 40 at nine Southern Glazer's Wine & Spirits distribution centres, where they have flagged more than 35,000 verified discrepancies. Its cold chain version, launched in February 2026, works from ambient temperature down to minus 20°F without localization infrastructure. Gather AI pairs drones that read inventory at rest with forklift cameras that read it in motion, and says Geodis cut manual counting from 4,400 hours a year to 800.

A large warehouse with pallet racks, block stacked goods and a forklift, 2007. Photo: Axisadman / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Some rack scanners stay on the ground. On 30 September 2026 Iron Mountain said it was the first customer for Dexory's new ground robots, which reach racks up to 18 metres high and scan 16,100 locations an hour, and it reported inventory accuracy rising from 97.8% to 99.9%. ABB's robot range has no inventory drone, and no source for this post shows an ABB robot working with one, so ABB's place would be beside them. The Flexley Stack F712, launched in July 2026, is an autonomous forklift that lifts loads of up to 2,000 kg to 8.5 metres and navigates with Visual SLAM cameras, without markers or reflectors.

ABB's Flexley Stack F712 autonomous forklift lifting a pallet of boxes toward a rack. Photo: ABB

Where inventory drones and warehouse robots go next

A drone that finds a pallet in the wrong slot still needs someone, or something, to move it. ABB's Flexley Stack forklifts can be fitted with a barcode reader, a weighing device and smart forks, so a forklift robot could check a pallet's label while moving it, working from the drone's report. None of the sources shows that pairing in use, so it is a possibility for now. ABB's Visual SLAM also tells fixed landmarks apart from people and vehicles, which is the same problem a drone has when it finds its way indoors without markers.

ABB's Flexley Stack F712 forklift with Flexley Tug and Flexley Mover robots in a test hall. Photo: ABB

For factories and distribution centres, drones are moving from night shifts to working beside people, and into places people avoid. Corvus offers a version for freezer warehouses and reports fully autonomous flights with nobody on site. Kabir says his fleet analyses more than a million locations every month, and Corvus says 35% of inventory labour at its customers moved to other work. For homes, the payoff is an online stock figure that matches the shelf: IKEA says its drones help keep products available for online and in-store orders. The same counting problem is also turning up in kitchens, as our post on pantry inventory robots shows.

ABB's Flexley Mover P604 among stacked wooden crates; it moves loads around a plant without fixed tracks. Photo: ABB

Flying over people needs dependable obstacle detection. IKEA's first fleet flew only when stores were closed, and by 2024 its drones could reroute around obstacles and fly next to co-workers. Skills change as well. In Walmart's 2016 test one worker in a control centre watched the scans in real time, and today's sites need people who can read discrepancy reports and act on them. Cost decides the rest, and most of the savings quoted so far, from Geodis's hours to Corvus's labour share, are figures the companies report about themselves.

J Sainsbury's regional distribution centre at Waltham Point, 2008. Photo: Nick Saltmarsh / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Innovation

AI solutions for effortless ABB robot control.

Automation

Robotics

ceojohntran@chatwithrobot.net

+84905311611

© 2025. All rights reserved.

qtran1215@gmail.com