DRONE-BASED EDGE LEARNING FOR MID-TRAINED AI IN LIVE ENVIRONMENTSbroad
DELTA · Horizon Europe grant · 2026-05-01–2028-04-30
EC contribution
Total cost
Beneficiaries
About the data
Source: CORDIS (official EU open data), Horizon Europe. Framework HORIZON · call HORIZON-EIC-2025-ACCELERATOR-02 · scheme HORIZON-EIC-ACC · topic HORIZON-EIC-2025-ACCELERATOR-02-OPEN-01. CORDIS record →
Objective
DELTA is the first system to perform high-resolution, safety-critical racking damage detection directly on-drone, under strict compute and bandwidth constraints, in a fully autonomous fashion. Unlike conventional inspection methods that rely on manual checks, DELTA executes full 2D/3D inference on resource-constrained drone hardware (<1 GB RAM, <100 ms latency, <0.5 Mbps uplink), ensuring compliance with warehouse safety standards (EN 15635 and ANSI/RMI MH16.1).The system’s breakthrough lies in its domain-specific mid-training pipeline: Verity’s fleet generates ~0.5M unlabeled images per day across 150+ facilities. This proprietary stream is used for large-scale mid-training, before fine-tuning on 10k+ expert-labeled cases from IKEA. This combination—normally reserved for foundation-model labs—enables robust generalization across facilities and delivers rare-class recall levels.To handle the scale and variability of warehouse operations, DELTA integrates advanced spatial intelligence and attention mechanisms: adaptive capture, ROI prioritization, and cascaded defect detectors exploit the repetitive rack geometry, focusing compute only on defect-critical regions. A continuous active-learning loop allows the fleet to improve at each flight, with uncertain detections flagged for expert review and injected back into training.The result is a fully autonomous inspection swarm that navigates live warehouses without GPS, self-charges, and synchronizes flights, while fog nodes provide multi-drone 3D fusion and the cloud supports retraining and drift analytics. Inspection results feed into a digital twin of the warehouse, integrated into existing WMS systems to provide predictive risk insights and compliance traceability.By uniting inventory automation and racking inspection in one platform, DELTA lowers adoption costs and sets a new benchmark for warehouse safety. With IKEA as a pilot partner, Verity is positioned to become the global leader in warehouse automation.
Beneficiaries (1)
| Organisation | Country | Role | EC contribution | SME |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Verity AG | CH | coordinator | €2,449,894 | Yes |
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