Corvus Robotics (YC S18) Inventory drones with full life-cycle autonomy
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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/2018746764954878107Every 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!
HN · launched Feb 3, 2026 · 7 upvotes (top 62%) · 0 views
Niche: robotics software and platforms · 195 launches, 9 in the last 7 days ▼ -36% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Logistics
- Hardware & robotics
- B2B
- AI feature
- Commercial product
More like this: all 195 launches in robotics software and platforms →
Could you build this?
No Autonomous warehouse inventory drones require custom hardware design, real-time SLAM in GPS-denied indoor environments, computer vision for barcode reading, and physical safety systems.
What it would actually take: The product demands specialized drone hardware with onboard compute (e.g., NVIDIA Jetson), custom sensor suites (LiDAR, optical flow, stereo depth cameras), and autonomous docking/charging stations. The core challenges lie in robust visual-inertial odometry (VIO) and LiDAR SLAM in dynamic warehouse aisles without GPS, combined with real-time barcode/RFID scanning algorithms and integration into enterprise WMS (Warehouse Management Systems). This requires a multidisciplinary robotics, electrical, and aerospace engineering team.
Discussion
5 comments analyzed.
Concerns raised: Visual SLAM loop closure challenges in repetitive warehouse environments, GPS-denied autonomous navigation reliability
Feature requests: Embedded sensing option for custom-built warehouse infrastructure
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 314 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #177 of 315 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 87 days after the earliest competitor.
- RoboDock: Autonomous Depots for Autonomous Fleets · yc · 2026-02-19 · 13 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- Tensr: Building Autonomous Robotic Factories · yc · 2025-11-14 · 365 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- Aerial-autonomy-stack · hn · 2026-06-27 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- Agency Tool Company: The build and deployment platform for robotics · yc · 2026-07-28 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- Odin Robotics: Robot arms that do repetitive manual work in existing factories · yc · 2026-10-23 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- twentyfour26: Building Fully Autonomous Factories in America · yc · 2026-11-04 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- Forge Robotics - The Future of Manufacturing · yc · 2025-11-10 · 285 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- SparrowFlight · github · 2026-11-02 · 35 upvotes · similarity 0.46
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