Avian APIs

Inspiration

When we visited the furniture store IKEA, we passed by a section that was filled with carton boxes on huge shelves that were 10x taller than us. That is when we wondered how are companies able to track their inventory with that kind of setup, and how efficient their current strategy if they need a worker to reach all the way up to be able to scan an item.

What it does

Our drone SkyScan will eliminate safety hazards for these workers as it can fly to the top to scan the product, no more need for the worker to risk falling while being lifted. The drone flies through the warehouse by first mapping the environment, and then it accurately scans each item on each shelves, adding the information of the product in the inventory management database. It will store data such as the product name and its ID, the location of the product in the warehouse, and the quantity.

How we built it

We built the project using MeDo. The application software uses the runtime environment Node.js and programming language TypeScript.

Challenges we ran into

We found it difficult to decide which topic to talk about because we did not know what kind of challenges a drone could be able to solve. Initially, we chose a different issue but pivoted to this one because we realized that the previous idea had some flaws. It was not really an important issue, and using drones for the task was not effective compared to using other robotics such as rovers.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This is the very first hackathon for most members, so we are proud to have built a functioning application software. Integrating it with Vercel is also something we are proud of because now it looks like our project has its own site.

What we learned

We learned how to critically think about solving an issue while considering the context of our solution. Like previously mentionned, after examining the issues that we tried to solve with our drone design, we can realize if our solution is truly the best solution for the challenge.

What's next for Avian APIs

We want to increase the fleet size to be able to synchronize between each other so that it can reduce the overall workload of a drone. It will also increase efficiency as it will take less time to be able to scan the entire warehouse. This feature is scalable because companies will want to have a certain amount of drones depending on the size of their warehouse.