Let’s talk about inventory drones, their “brains” and capabilities, how all this stuff works, and how drones can have your back in the case of wrong pallet marking.
Kirill Bondarenko | Technology Expert
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From our previous posts about drone-based inventory, you already know that drones cannot fully replace humans since they cannot handle tricky non-standard cases, but, at the same time, they show unprecedented accuracy and careful record taking.
Today, I will tell you how UVL Robotics solution helps detect possible errors and inaccuracies during standard warehouse inventory.
Pallet scanning with no duplication
Every pallet is marked with a unique barcode that will be recorded in the accounting system to track the pallet location and keep the warehouse records. Unfortunately, sometimes an employee may lose count and scan the same pallet twice, which leads to accounting errors or even rack double-checks.
UVL Robotics software has an embedded specialized filter that prevents barcode duplication and creation of repeated pallets. In other words, if a drone scans the same pallet with the same code assigned, the algorithm considers it a duplication and reports an error. Therefore, this helps avoid errors emerging by accident or inattention.
In rare cases, the same barcodes can be assigned to different pallets, which happens either by mistake or in line with the customer’s preferences. In this situation, the filter reads this error up to three times. After the third reading, the counter is set to zero and the barcode can be reregistered as another pallet, which might take a little more time. Statistics can be collected manually as the UVL Robotics solution allows you to switch to manual mode and flexibly adapt to specifics of tricky marking.
Putting every pallet in place with inventory drones
Every pallet has its own unique barcode is assigned to a particular warehouse location, to a particular cell.
Drones scan pallets rightwards and downwards, moving along the warehouse racks. The inventory drone pilot watches the drone-scanned cells highlighted in the warehouse layout via tablet. It’s like reading a book where a rack is a page and pallets are words.
The table accumulates not only pallet numbers and their barcodes, but also their locations. The report you get displays all deviations from the ideal pallet location. If there is an error or products are not in their cells, this problem is easily detected and handled.
Universal logic and adaptable report
The process can be customized. If you want to solve an unconventional task, we can easily adapt the tool to your business. However, considering the previous solution demonstrations and implementations, I can tell that customization is often left unrequired as the drone boasts all the necessary functionality to accelerate inventory taking and create user-friendly reports.
We can also prepare reports in a format familiar to the customer, as well as configure the filters to detect additional marking. For example, a drone can be set to scan multiple barcodes assigned to the same pallet with a further display of this data in the report; this is easy to do and usually negotiated before the works start.
If you got interested in this solution, learn more about it on our website or get a consultation with our experts.
