On Wednesday, the last day of eyefortranport ’s 3PL Summit and Chief Supply Chain Officer Summit in Chicago, the day began with a panel on cutting edge technologies that could change the face of logistics. The panel included six people, but in the interest of brevity I’ll mainly focus on the comments of two participants: Ken Piro – the VP of Marketing at PINC Solutions – spoke on drone technology; Bruce Welty – Chairman of Locus Robotics – focused on goods-to-man robots. PINC Solutions provides drones for use in yards and warehouses. Daimler is one of their clients. PINC’s traditional solutions include yard management systems that make use of RFID for real time location of yard assets. PINC’s relationship with Daimler involved providing a traditional yard solution to synchronize the inbound flow of goods to Daimler factories. But Daimler was looking for a solution for tracking finished vehicles, which are packed very tightly in large yards. In fact, with vehicles packed bumper to bumper, you could not read the vehicles RFID tags that were packed in the middle. Thus, was born their drone business. Drones can read vehicle IDs of Daimler cars or trucks in the middle of a line of vehicles. For drones that will cross outside of property owned by a company, stringent regulations are still in place. Those regulations became a little less onerous this week when the Federal Aviation Administration released new guidelines . Nevertheless, using drones to fulfill orders would still be illegal, even if it was economically feasible; which many doubt. In contrast, PINC’s drones are used for asset location and for cycle counting inside warehouses. Mr. Piro pointed out that when a full cycle count (i.e., checking to see that inventory the system says is located in certain slots is really there) […]