Ware Develops Drone-Based Inventory Automation for Warehousing

Ware?, a San Francisco-based technology company, has launched a warehouse inventory automation system built on the Skydio 2 drone platform.

Tracking and counting inventory cost-effectively is one of the $1.9 trillion warehousing industry’s greatest challenges. This new product was designed specifically to address these challenges. It is designed to assist customers to increase the accuracy and frequency of inventory tracking, while simultaneously reducing its cost.

“Today, our solution can deliver full-counts every month—increasing most customers’ frequency by 6x,” said Joseph Moster, CTO and co-founder, Ware. “Our system leverages fleets of drones to capture images of every bin location in a facility, giving operators a visual audit history of the status of their inventory and proactively alerting them to potential issues.” Moster continues, “And we don’t just stop there—all of those same images contribute to building the largest-ever visual dataset of warehouse inventory, which serves as the backbone of our machine learning algorithms.”

Most warehouses and distribution centers make an attempt to do twice-yearly or quarterly full-counts of their inventory. However, because of labor challenges and competing priorities, many don’t reach those goals.

“The extreme growth of e-commerce has caused warehousing to expand rapidly over the past two decades,” said Ian Smith, CEO and co-founder, Ware. “That, combined with the historically-low unemployment rate in the U.S., means that demand for the warehouse workforce has outstripped the supply. Warehouses are increasingly looking towards automation and robotics as solutions to fill these gaps in their inventory departments. That’s why we created Ware. Hardware is hard. So we partnered with ?Skydio to integrate their latest drone, Skydio 2, as the data collection vehicle for our system.

This allows Ware to focus deeply on delivering accurate data results to their customers.

“We're incredibly excited to partner with Ware to build the first indoor warehousing product on Skydio 2,” said Adam Bry, CEO, Skydio. “Indoor drone use cases have been talked about for years, and with Skydio 2’s visual navigation system and Ware’s product, it’s finally possible to deliver the solutions customers have been asking for.”