At a GNC warehouse in Whitestown, Indiana, workers see and hear four drones overhead every day as they complete tasks that few humans want to do: count and track full boxes of products across more than 2,000 pallets in the warehouse’s aisles.
The drones’ regular flights allow GNC, a nutritional manufacturing company, to obtain a full view of its 250,000-square-foot reserve inventory once a month rather than once a quarter, said Bill Monk, GNC’s vice president of distribution. More frequent monitoring helps the company achieve its goal of reducing backorders, which occur when its inventory system records items as in stock even though they’re missing from shelves, or from the warehouse altogether.
“It helps us cycle it faster. If you don’t know where it is, you can’t ship it,” Monk told Business Insider.
GNC started using the drones, which come from Corvus Robotics, two years ago. Since then, nonshipments have plummeted from several hundred units a day to around 98, Monk said. Now, GNC’s inventory staffers have more time to investigate and follow up on discrepancies by validating and correcting problems flagged by the drone system.
AI helps with drone positioning and insights
GNC’s inventory staff works with Corvus to schedule the drones so they cover specific areas during their 25- to 30-minute flights, said Jackie Wu, the founder and CEO of Corvus Robotics.
“There’s a lot of physical AI on board the vehicle that enables us to collect the data and move autonomously in these environments,” Wu told Business Insider. “The AI is helping the customers with what to do with their inventory data, what to do with the discrepancies.” Specifically, AI helps the drones get accurate positioning so they can move safely and reliably. Drone images and videos also help staff find misplaced products, pallets half-off the rack, and fallen boxes.
Generally, drones can be networked to access the internet and remotely query large AI models, said Brendan Englot, the director of the Stevens Institute for Artificial Intelligence and a professor at Stevens Institute of Technology. He said that networking capabilities enable drones to operate with less onboard computing so they can fly longer before needing a recharge. And, since warehouses have stable lighting conditions and few or no windows, drones’ computer vision algorithms can be tuned to a single environment, which is ideal for performance, Englot said.
AI also allows non-experts to more easily ask questions or provide drone instructions in plain English, Englot said. “The language element of these models bridges the gap between an expert robotics engineer and an employee in the warehouse,” he said.
Drones reduce operational issues at GNC
Before using the drones, GNC’s inventory staff included 20 people, and it was difficult to find staff willing to handle the monotonous work and take on the undesirable shifts required for manual inventory counts, said Monk.
Employee turnover has improved since introducing the drones, Monk said. Workers are happy to have the drones do inventory, as “it is not a very fun job and it takes a lot of pallets counted to find a needle in a haystack,” Monk said.
Tammy Lacher, a senior specialist in inventory control at GNC, agreed. “The drones handle the counting, and our team gets to do more investigative work. It takes a lot of the grind out of the job,” Lacher said. “It’s pretty cool to be working with this kind of technology every day.”
With the adoption of drones, most of GNC’s original inventory team members were reassigned to different roles, like customer service or inventory accuracy in active product-picking areas, or left through attrition, said Monk. Now, one to two inventory team members focus on the reserve inventory area and regularly verify the accuracy of the drones’ data. “We audit 2% of what the drones said was right, to make sure,” Monk said.
Once, a drone showed a location with 600 boxes, contradicting GNC data that documented 60 boxes. “Everybody thought the drone was wrong,” Monk said, but it was not. A staff member had input the wrong box size, eliminating a zero at the end of a measurement.
Drones have some limitations
Drones have a few limitations. For GNC, one is their plastic-wrapped pallets, said Monk. GNC’s reserve inventory is in 70″ aisles, a narrow space for drones that are two-thirds of that width and have moving rotors. The drone sensors can see through plastic for inventory counting, but when plastic is cut and flapping, the blades can get caught, sending the drone down, he said.
To get around this, staffers are trained to cut and remove plastic when removing boxes from a pallet. Workers typically scan the aisle for issues before the scheduled drone flies through, said Monk.
He added that GNC’s accuracy has increased significantly, but the company only uses drones for reserve inventory, which typically includes unopened boxes. The drones cannot look back to see into open boxes that have been picked through, but the software can provide case-level estimating, Wu said.
Still, the drones have helped GNC in ways Monk didn’t anticipate. “When you’re not finding a problem for a quarter or six months, you spend a lot of time trying to solve it. The drone expedites that problem,” he said.
