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

Details

External ID
46877420
Source
HN
Company
—
Product
—
Website domain
—
Launched
Feb. 3, 2026
Cohort
—
Upvotes
7
Upvotes percentile
0.38207547169811323
Tags
—
Fetched at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Updated at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.

Description

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!

Enrichment

Theme
autonomous robotics, drones, and sensor hardware
Vertical
Logistics
Function
Hardware & robotics
Audience
B2B
AI stance
AI feature
Project type
Commercial product
Normalized one-liner
autonomous inventory drones
Manually corrected
False

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 — 122 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #74 of 123 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 87 days after the earliest competitor.

Other launches for this product

Same idea, different domain

Nobody's really built a hardware & robotics tool for Horizontal yet.