- Do we need an operating authorisation for a drone inside our warehouse?
- For operation that stays inside the building, the Luftfahrt-Bundesamt states that operator registration, classification into an operating category and the remote-pilot competence certificate do not apply. Authorisation is bound to that classification, so where no classification arises there is no category-bound authorisation route to walk. As soon as any part of the flight path leaves the building, that no longer holds.
- So no law applies inside the hall?
- No — what changes is which law. Your duties as an employer are untouched: a risk assessment for the work equipment, control of who enters the area during operation, defined behaviour on loss of control or loss of the radio link. Data protection is untouched, because the system works with cameras and a hall is a workplace even at night. And on the product side the machinery regime applies.
- Why would the Machinery Regulation apply to an aircraft?
- Because both of its aviation exclusions carry conditions. Article 2(2)(e) excludes means of transport by air, and recital 17 grounds that in risks arising from the transport of goods, persons or animals — a machine that carries a camera and transports nothing is not obviously caught. Article 2(2)(f) excludes aeronautical products only “insofar as Regulation (EU) 2018/1139 covers the relevant essential health and safety requirements”. Where aviation law covers nothing indoors, the condition is not met. We state plainly that this is a reading of the wording and the recital: no authority has ruled on pure indoor inventory operation, which is exactly why the documents belong in the contract rather than in an assumed category.
- What if the route crosses a yard between two halls?
- Then it is not operation inside buildings, and the full apparatus returns: registration, operating category, remote pilot, and for anything beyond the open category a risk assessment with an operating authorisation. Twenty metres of yard is not a routing detail, it is a change of legal regime. That case is specified with wedrone, and it belongs at the start of the spec rather than at commissioning.
- Drone or ground robot?
- The racking decides. High-bay pallet positions favour the air, because reaching the top tier otherwise means a picker and a person at height. Retail and low-bay shelving favours the floor, because a ground robot runs longer, carries more sensor and raises none of the questions above. Sites with both get both, specified as one count.
- Is this the same as your delivery & logistics solution?
- No. Delivery moves goods — totes and pallets between dock, line and storage. This page counts them. Different machines, different cadence, different legal frame, and no overlap in hardware. Most warehouse customers eventually want both, and then the move and the count are specified against the same system of record.
- What is actually deployed today?
- More than in most robotics categories. Verity states its inventory drones run at over one hundred warehouse sites and its systems are used by IKEA, DSV, Maersk and UPS. Ubica Robotics has scan robots in productive use at dm-drogerie markt in Germany since mid-2022, scaled from around fifty to roughly one hundred units by 2024. doks. solution in Kassel sells doks.inventairy for high-bay storage. Corvus Robotics and Gather AI are real products but we have found no route to procure them in Germany, and we would rather say that than list them.
- Is this a wedrone page?
- No, and that is the point. The entire wedrone apparatus — SORA, an LBA operating authorisation, certified partner operators, a landing pad — is precisely what indoor operation switches off. An inventory drone in a closed hall has no aviation case to build. It belongs here, next to the ground robot doing the same job, because choosing between them is a hardware decision and not an aviation question.