Towards An Autonomous Warehouse Inventory Scheme

We present in this paper a novel warehouse inventory scheme. The main purpose of this work is to make the inventory process completely autonomous. To this end, an Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) and an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) work cooperatively. The UGV is used as the carrying platform, and considered as a ground reference for the indoor flight of the UAV. While the UAV is used as the mobile scanner. The UGV navigates among rows of racks carrying the UAV. At each rack to be scanned, the UGV stops, and the UAV takes off to fly vertically scanning goods in that rack. Once the UAV at the top, the UGV moves to the next rack, and since the UAV takes the UGV as the ground reference, it will follow it autonomously, this results in placing the UAV at the top of the second rack, and scanning goods from top to bottom starts. the process is repeated until the row of racks is fully scanned. The UAV then lands on the UGV, and recharge its batteries while the UGV moves to the next row of racks. We present in this paper the proposed architecture, as well as the first experimental results of the proposed scheme.