Towards automating stocktaking in warehouses: Challenges, trends, and reliable approaches

Stocktaking refers to the examination or counting over of materials, supplies, goods or products inside a stockroom, store, warehouse. There are many challenges concerning this important business function, which are even more demanding inside an unstructured large warehouse. Huge variance in size, volume, shape of the stock-keeping units that are stored in bulk without packaging, leads to many emerging problems that necessitate significant research endeavors so as to develop solutions that can automate this process. Nowadays, there are many approaches related to computer vision-based stocktaking in unstructured warehouses with products stored in bulk, which employ several existing technologies namely Deep Learning, Optical Character Recognition, and 3D model retrieval. The paper at hand aims at presenting the i-Count Air concept which outlines the utilization of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, endowed with cognitive hardware sensors, active vision and an innovative perception and stocktaking software, that will push the boundaries of robotic perception and help automate the inventory counting function in a Warehouse 5.0 environment.