Inventory inspection is an important task to eliminate the inconsistency between real assets and inventory management systems, and it is performed periodically at the site. In the case of a large-sized property, it is mainly managed in an outdoor workshop or a warehouse. However, due to the large area of the outdoor area, it is relatively difficult to identify the quantity and location of the property and is also vulnerable to theft. To solve this problem, we proposed a method and system for performing a warehouse inventory inspection using an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and Bluetooth low energy (BLE) beacons. The proposed method has the following advantages. First of all, if we carry out inventory inspection by utilizing UAV, we can minimize user’s effort compared to existing methods. The method of recognizing the asset by attaching the BLE beacon is more costly than using the existing RFID technology, but it is advantageous because the recognition distance is increased and the battery life of the tag is drastically increased. We also designed a BLE beacon reader for the system and implemented a prototype to show the feasibility of the proposed system. The prototype is based on Genuino 101, which is a kind of arduino, and adds HM-10 and Neo-6m modules to provide Bluetooth and GPS functions. The BLE beacon reader was tested in outdoor, and attached in drone. We also developed an inventory checking system based on the web to display results of inventory checking. The proposed approach enables the users to automate the operation of inventory checking on an outdoor warehouse.

In many industries, the accurate and quick checking of goods in storage is of great importance. Most today's inventory checking is based on bar code scanning, but the relative position between a bar code and an optical scanner should be maintained in close distance and proper angle for the successful scanning. This requirement makes it difficult to fully automate the inventory information/control systems. The use of RFID technology can be a solution for overcoming this problem. The mobile robot presented in this paper is equipped with an RFID tag scanning system, that automates the otherwise manual or semi-automatic inventory checking process. We designed the robot system in a quite practical approach, and the developed system is close to the commercialization stage. In our experiments, the robot could collect information of goods stacked on shelves autonomously without any failure and maintain corresponding database while it navigated predefined paths between the shelves using vision.