Warehouse distribution centers are a hub of activity as workers offload pallets and shift valuable, sometimes perishable, inventory from one place to the next. At the end of the day, when the incessant beeping of forklifts quiet and warehouse workers head home,
Verity’s
drone fleet buzzes to life. Packing its own lighting, software, and cameras, the Verity “night crew” navigates the floor to ceiling industrial shelves autonomously scanning barcodes and verifying digital inventory records.
Born in the lab, bred on Broadway
Verity’s been pulling the night shift since it opened its doors in 2014. The company co-founded by ETH Zurich Professor Raffaello D’Andrea is built upon fundamental research that spun out his lab in the Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control. The spinoff quickly became a global leader in autonomous indoor drone systems - proving the robustness of their technologies on the world’s stage. Verity first emerged on the live events scene as “Verity Studios”, quickly solidifying their reputation for safety and reliability. In the meantime, their warehouse automation solution was being developed in stealth mode, eventually launching in 2020.
“While Verity’s technology has certainly advanced beyond the lab, much of it originates with our basic research,” says Co-founder and CTO, Markus Hehn. Hehn developed learning algorithms during his doctoral work at ETH Zurich that made it possible for quadcopters to learn to fly a slalom course and play catch with a pendulum. Today these systems enable the drones at Verity to learn how to navigate autonomously. Likewise, research from Verity Head of Product and ETH Alum Federico Augugliaro, on how to coordinate fleets of drones to carry out complex tasks such as flight assembled architecture and building a rope bridge, still influences many current aspects of Verity’s work.
Night after night, in live shows, Verity put the applications of its basic research to the test, flying more than 300,000 flights in 20 countries. The live events sector of their work took flight following a collaboration with Cirque du Soleil on the award-winning short film, “
Sparked…”
The dancing lampshades in
Sparked
inspired the later Lucie drones. The “Lucies” dazzled live audiences with spectacular lightshows that took place directly over the heads of large audiences, and some of the world’s top performers such as Cirque du Soleil’s Broadway musical, Paramour, Metallica’s WorldWired tour, and Celine Dion’s Courage World Tour.
