Siyi Chen for Quartz:  Manually scanning inventory in a giant warehouse is extremely time-consuming and prone to mistakes. But with a new system created by scientists from the MIT Media Lab, drones might one day do the work for us. And even better, they’ll do it more efficiently and accurately.

A prototype created by the scientists can catalogue items instantly as the drones fly up and down the aisles. They called the new system RFly, which involves two novel features: A custom-built circuit board that can be mounted on many existing indoor drones, and an algorithm that can accurately locate an item.

To develop the new system, the team of MIT researchers, led by Fadel Adib, started by examining the limitations of a widely-used warehouse management system: RFID (radio-frequency identification). It works by attaching unique wireless tags to every package. The tags contain electronically stored information which can be read by an RFID scanner. But the biggest problem with this system is that a worker has to manually hold the scanner close to a package to pick up the signal, making it a laborious process. And there are often signal interferences, which can introduce errors.  Full Article: