Tesla unveils ‘meh’rvelous inventory drone at its Giga Berlin factory

True to its reputation of using cutting-edge tech to produce equally state-of-the-art electric vehicles, Tesla has introduced a warehouse drone and robotic vehicle duo with astonishing capabilities to its Giga Berlin facility. True to the reputation of company CEO Elon Musk, however, the manner of communicating that news rather outstrips the development’s underlying import.

This week Tesla Manufacturing hailed the work and super-size efficiency of the tethered drone and robotic vehicle deployed for warehousing work at the company’s giant Giga Berlin plant. Named “Pathfinder” and “Opportunity” after the NASA craft producing eye-opening results on Mars, the fully autonomous pair were credited with being able to “accurately count up to 12.000 pallets a day – each!”

Those are definitely serious inventory results, and as such generated over 100 amazed and admiring social media plaudits. Many of those responding Tesla fans understandably drew the conclusion that the drone and ground robot combo was the work of company geeks applying the miraculous, futuristic visions of Musk to create in-house tech attaining feats achieved nowhere else.

In fact, drone-based systems have been doing astonishing things in warehouses across the globe for years now. The craft turning admittedly impressive results at Tesla’s Berlin facility, meanwhile, looks ever so much like a considerably modified DJI Mavic 2 Pro.

To be sure, reconfiguring and tethering a store-bought drone so it can theoretically work indefinitely – no battery recharging or swaps! – is a great idea, yet already done. And smarting-up that bar code-scanning UAV to be able to keep updated inventories and communicate anomalies detected to managers in real time is also slick – albeit not novel.

Indeed, similar moves to revolutionize warehouse management were already put into action far earlier by UK startup RawView, whose tethered, automated iventAiry XL platform works with what the company say is “data accuracy of more than 99%.” 

Swiss-based company Verity, meanwhile, believes using swarms of self-navigating drones that rotate between recharging stints is a faster and more effective way of providing uninterrupted work, producing what is calls “zero-error warehouse” inventories.

To be fair, all three approaches have their inherent advantages. Tesla’s Giga Berlin set-up is notable in using the ground vehicle for lower-level scans while leaving higher areas to the drone. That way, employees presumably may access the work area with minimized risk of head-butting the UAV (but may suffer shin scrapes from plowing into the robot).

While RawView and Verity have earned applause for their ground-breaking work for clients that include Maersk and the logistics units of Ikea and Samsung, meanwhile, they don’t offer figures to compare to the 12,000 pallet achievements that “Pathfinder” and “Opportunity” rack up. 

Assuming, of course those counts are their actual, habitual totals – since nothing coming from Muskland could possibly be exaggerated, much less outrageous.