Viziotix software powers warehouse robots and drones

Viziotix, a French SAAS startup, provides barcode scanning software that is helping to accelerate the digitisation of the warehouse (including robotic inventory counting). The new company provides computer-vision software that enables drones and robotics-based solutions to scan barcodes using their on-board cameras.

As the robot or drone makes its sweep of the aisles, racks and pallet locations, the camera streams images to a processor running the Viziotix scanner library. Here the images are rapidly scanned for barcodes and the decoded barcode data is sent to the inventory application and then to the WMS.

“We are leading the transformation and digitisation of the warehouse and distribution centre,” says Cedric Mollon, CEO at Viziotix. “Our software enables the scanning of 1D and 2D barcodes on pallet and rack barcode labels using cameras integrated into robotic applications and we have overcome the challenges of distance, lighting and movement blur to make this possible.

“In this application, a particular challenge is to find all the codes, even at the extreme edges of the image, and even when the resolution is very low – because the pixels are spread over whole pallets and not just focused on the shipping label. We find all the codes and this is what makes us unique.”

The four founders of Viziotix set up the company after discussions with logistics automation solution providers and associations.

“We realized,” Mollon continues, “many warehouses still do manual counts and that the companies designing automation solutions were being held back because they were not getting the barcode performance, or support they needed, to perfect their products and take them to market. To make automation viable you need near 100% efficiency in barcode detection and you need to scan very large image files in milli-seconds.

“Because of our extensive background in barcode scanning, we knew we could solve these problems and do it up to 10x faster than current solutions. Viziotix may be new, but we founders have a combined experience in this technology of over 60 years.”

doks.innovation GmbH, an early customer for the company, provides a robot & drone-based system for warehouse inventory analysis. “We chose Viziotix for our automated inventory management solution ‘inventairy’,” says Mike Becker, Managing Director & Co-Founder at doks. innovation. “Our thorough competitive analysis showed that the Viziotix software outperforms the other solutions available on the market today both in terms of reading rate and speed.

“Going forward, we believe that our robotic drone solution, ‘inventairy’, and Viziotix software, makes for a powerful solution for the digitisation of logistics.”

Viziotix software is fully released and SDKs are available. However, as a SAAS company it plans to continue to improve and release new versions of the barcode scanning software and provide the highest levels of support to its customers. It also plans to add new functionality given that robotics in the warehouse is still relatively new and evolving.

According to Mollon: “Automated inventory solutions are already replacing manual cycle and wall-to-wall counts, reducing the costs of errors, improving delivery times and therefore lowering overall warehouse costs. But by continuous improvement and with new data capture technologies, there is the potential to offer even more value, accelerate the roll-out and extend automation to picking and other use-cases inside and outside the four walls.”