A pair of sneakers that goes missing on a warehouse shelf used to stay missing for up to six months at ASICS America — long enough that a customer's order would simply get cancelled. Corvus Robotics announced on November 10 that its autonomous Corvus One drones have cut that recovery time by roughly 60% inside ASICS America's 855,000-square-foot distribution center in Byhalia, Mississippi.
The drones fly seven missions a night starting around 7 p.m., working narrow aisles less than six feet wide using onboard computer vision rather than beacons, reflectors or Wi-Fi infrastructure. They focus on two of the facility's highest-risk zones: the singles area, where returned and broken-pair stock sits, and case reserve storage. Both zones previously got counted roughly twice a year under ASICS's standard cycle-count policy; Corvus One now counts them monthly, a sixfold increase in frequency.
Why footwear warehouses are a hard counting problem
"A footwear distribution center carrying tens of thousands of SKUs across every channel is one of the more complex inventory environments in the industry," said Corvus Robotics CEO and co-founder Mohammed Kabir. Footwear multiplies SKU counts by style, size and color, and singles — odd, unmatched units from returns — are especially easy to lose track of in a large reserve area.
"If a unit went missing, we might not find it for six months," said Kyle Koestler, ASICS America's senior director of distribution and transportation. "That could be the last pair in the building for an order we've already taken, and then the customer gets a cancellation. With Corvus One, we're cycle counting on a monthly basis so we can surface any errors sooner and ensure customer orders are delivered on time." ASICS has also redirected roughly 200 hours of monthly counting labor into inventory research and resolving discrepancies instead.
A crowded field betting on drones over people with scanners
Corvus Robotics, founded in 2017 by Jackie Wu and Mohammed Kabir and based in Mountain View, California, has deployed more than 300 drones across 26 US states plus Canada and Mexico, serving over 30 enterprise customers including Southern Glazer's Wine & Spirits, GNC and MSI Surfaces. The company has raised $18 million in Series A funding led by S2G Ventures and Spero Ventures, with backers that include a Tesla co-founder and former Amazon Kiva Systems executives.
Warehouse drone counting competes directly with manual cycle counts and with fixed-infrastructure vision systems that require cameras or beacons bolted to racking. Corvus's pitch is that its drones need none of that: no reflectors, no added localization hardware, and operation down to -20°F. As warehouse operators face mounting pressure to automate inventory accuracy without adding headcount, the ASICS deployment gives Corvus a concrete, named case study — a sixfold counting-frequency increase and a specific labor-hour figure — that rivals pitching similar systems will now have to match.