"Corvus Robotics, an electronic drone startup that's just coming out of stealth, has decided that they want to go after warehouse inventory tracking. That is, making sure that a warehouse knows exactly what's inside of it and where. This is a more complicated task than it seems like it should be, and not just any robot is able to do it. Corvus' solution involves autonomous drones that can fly unattended for weeks on end, collecting inventory data without any human intervention at all," reports IEEE Spectrum.
"Corvus Robotics' drones are able to inventory an entire warehouse on a rolling basis in just a couple days, while it would take a human team weeks to do the same task."
Although Corvus does not reveal all of their flight navigation secrets in the article, the most effective means of navigating warehouses would involve a series of electronic beacons that are placed at various heights on the shelves, so the robots are constantly triangulating their location by pinging those beacons. This method is very similar to the "echo location" used by bats and many sea creatures.