Show HN: Corvus Robotics (YC S18) Inventory drones with full life-cycle autonomy

[robot_jackie]

Hi HN - we're Jackie and Kabir, building Corvus Robotics. Here's a video about 8 years of building robots in 1 minute: https://x.com/JackAndTheBots/status/2018746764954878107

Every physical thing you own sat in a warehouse at some point, and every warehouse has to do inventory checks. It's a boring job where big companies staff full-time people going up 30 ft using lift trucks all day to just... scan stuff with a barcode scanner, and write things down with paper and pen if inventory is in the wrong place or missing.

We spent the last 8 years building flying robots to automate this faster and cheaper.

Our drones fly week after week without human involvement (no teleop either!). They work in extremely self-similar, often feature-poor, GPS-denied environments. Our autonomy engine is vision-based and ML-first, mapping pixels to trajectories within a ~60W compute power budget, running our autonomy software fully onboard and in real-time. This enables accurate inventory capture and safe flight around people, other robots, and material handling equipment. We build all of our drones in-house in the Bay Area.

There are limits to what the drones can do based on what they can see. For example, they can’t see multiple pallets deep, or open a box to count screws. That said, most large companies that make and handle physical goods store inventory in ways we can help with.

Along the way, we've learned that the core sensing and compute stack we've built is great for data capture at scale for many robots in industrial settings. We hope to share more about this soon!

We’re sticking around all day to answer questions here, so feel free to ask whatever questions come to mind!

[bpg_92]

Congrats on the launch! The constraint of a ~60W compute budget for fully onboard autonomy in a GPS-denied environment is impressive, I'm curious about the 'feature-poor' aspect you mentioned. Warehouses are notorious for having repetitive scenery which usually hard for visual SLAM regarding loop closures. How do you prevent the drone from getting lost when aisle 4 looks exactly like aisle 40? Best of luck!

[4d4m]

Very cool! A drone makes sense for existing infrastructure. If a client built their warehouse to your specifications, would you still use drone tech, or would this sensing be embedded within?

[benjaminfh]

Congrats team! Really enjoyed the warts and all video - those fly-away moments remind me of my first drone flights :D

Are you mostly software stack focused or designing lots of hardware too?

[robot_jackie]

thanks lol - we design the entire stack including the hardware!

[alexistm]

Congratulations on the wins!

The product looks top tier.