Taking a page from the Amazon.com, Inc. AMZN playbook, Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. WMT is developing drones for their supply chain management. The company's VP of Emerging Sciences, Shekar Natarajan, showed off the big box retailer's new distribution center tech in Bentonville, Arkansas on Thursday.
The main reasons to implement drones in distribution centers is to replace inventory quality assurance employees, while also cutting inventory checks from a month to one day. Also, with the use of drone technology, Wal-Mart can improve the safety of all of the U.S. distribution centers.
As for how it works, the drones would be able to take 30 images per second from a mounted camera that is linked to a command center. Matches for tracking number would either read as green, blue and red, which translate to registered, empty spaces and mismatches. Despite being in early development phase, Natarajan said maturation is only 6-9 months away, with no definitive launch date set.
Other tech ideas in the works at Wal-Mart include virtual reality and artificial intelligence.
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