Swiss firm Verity wins robotics innovation award for warehouse drones

Swiss firm Verity wins robotics innovation award for warehouse drones

16 June 2026: Verity, a Swiss deep-tech company, has won the 2026 Award for Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Robotics & Automation, known as IERA, for an indoor drone system that counts warehouse inventory without GPS or human involvement. The award was announced by the International Federation of Robotics in Frankfurt.

Not yet independently verified. Deployment figures come from the IFR release, which does not attribute them to an independent audit. Verity's headquarters city is not given there. We will update this when it can be confirmed, and remove this note.

How the drones count stock

The drones are fully autonomous and are aimed at logistics and retail. They fly the warehouse aisles on their own, scan barcodes and return to charging stations. Perception, motion planning and obstacle avoidance all run on board each aircraft. The barcode data feeds straight into the customer's warehouse management system, which flags discrepancies, and a centralised cloud platform supports continuous learning and performance optimisation across fleets of drones.

Battery handling is modest by design. The IFR says the drones can work for months at a time, with two to three battery replacements per year.

Scale of the deployment

According to the release, Verity's drones capture about 500,000 images per day and are deployed in about 200 warehouses worldwide.

The IFR gives the business case in one line: locating misplaced items, such as fully loaded pallets, prevents write-offs.

What the jury and the winner said

Jim Ostrowski, IERA Award Committee Chair and vice president for industrial activities at IEEE RAS, called Verity's system "a mature product that has been successfully launched to support its customers". He said the jury was impressed by the company's significant patent portfolio and its business plan, and by its pioneering role in bringing the technology to market. The release names no individual jury members.

Markus Hehn, Co-founder and CTO of Verity, says: "It is a great honor to be recognized by the leading organizations in the robotics industry". The award photo shows Nancy Amato, President of IEEE RAS, Takayuki Ito, President of the IFR, Hehn and Ostrowski.

The two finalists

Two other companies reached the final:

• Open Navigation LLC, for Nav2, which the release calls the world's most widely used autonomous mobile robot navigation solution by deployment count. It is open source, configurable, production-tested and actively maintained.
• Innok Robotics, a German company, for its INDUROS ecosystem, an industrial mobile robot system for brownfield intralogistics that works in indoor halls, outdoor yards and uneven terrain.

A new global award for 2027

The release also announces that the IFR Global Robotics Award will debut in 2027. It is meant to honour industry-led innovations that bridge research and real-world deployment, and it is open to robot manufacturers, system integrators and component suppliers anywhere in the world. Entrants do not have to be IFR members.

Solutions must address significant societal challenges, drive technological innovation or show strong commercial potential, and they must be deployed in real-world settings and be commercially available or in active use. The call for applications opens in November 2026. Takayuki Ito says of the award: "The award has a global scope and is not restricted to IFR members."

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Sources

• IFR press release: IERA Award 2026 goes to flying warehouse robots by Verity, 16 June 2026
• IFR press release: US robot industry returns to double-digit growth, 18 June 2026