As a new workday dawns in the warehouse, workers take their places around the floor to start their shifts. So, too, do their mechanical counterparts: Robots roll away from the charging docks where they've been sleeping all night, receive their first instructions about the day's responsibilities, and get to work.
These machines, which look and act like self-driving shelves, are called autonomous mobile robots. The FlexShelf by Fetch Robotics, for instance, is a bot on wheels that can be equipped with up to three customizable baskets meant to accommodate whatever needs to be carried. It receives orders from a software system that tells humans and bots alike which items to grab in whatever order makes the process more efficient. A worker may spend their day in a small section of the warehouse picking items off warehouse shelves and loading them onto the robot assistant, which carts those items to the area where they'll be packaged and shipped to customers or stores.
This model is a far cry from the typical image of a 21st-century warehouse, staffed by humans who walk 9 miles or more a day to fulfill the endless orders generated by the e-commerce economy.
Amazon, the industry juggernaut, began bringing robots into its warehouses after purchasing the robotics company Kiva Systems in 2012. This year, it launched a billion-dollar fund focused on logistics and supply-chain robotics companies, the biggest splash in a sea of warehouse robotics investments and acquisitions. Zebra Technologies, which made one of those moves by buying Fetch Robotics in 2021, put out a white paper in May 2022 that estimated 27% of warehouse operators had already deployed robots like AMRs.
Zebra projected that in the next five years nearly all warehouses would employ some form of robot automation to keep from being swallowed by a tidal wave of online orders. And with all that automation comes questions about whether the robots actually save workers time or just put them under more pressure, in addition to more injury risk.
Jim Lawton, Zebra's vice president and general manager of robotics automation, told Insider some of his company's clients wanted to skip a pilot program and just get the robots into their buildings. "I've had somebody say to me, 'I don't even care about the return on investment anymore,'" he said, adding that customers said they couldn't meet orders and needed help.
Warehouses were slow to adopt robots. But recent technological innovations have jump-started the trend.
The first wave of industrial robots began to revolutionize manufacturing in the 1960s, Louis Hyman, a Cornell University historian of labor, told Insider. Since then, the process of building a car or a plane, for example, has grown more and more mechanized. Yet over the same period, a warehouse employee's workday has hardly changed. "You basically hand a human a pick list and say, 'Go get this stuff,'" Lawton said.
Warehousing was slower and more cautious in adopting robotics. The first large robots that began to work in warehouses were automated guided vehicles. To keep them from getting lost, and from interfering with or harming workers, AGVs were restricted to one path, like a train or a slot car. If an obstacle blocked their way, they simply stopped in their tracks.
But the new breed of AMR robots are free-roaming machines that find their own way. Their autonomy owes to understanding the layout of the warehouse and having enough on-board artificial intelligence to know not only where they're going but also how to navigate around unexpected obstacles. This represents a major technological leap forward, and AMRs like Fetch's FlexShelf need to see and understand their physical environment to navigate the warehouse floor safely and effectively.
As automation rises, so does the number of reported warehouse injuries
You might think that with robots fulfilling more of the manual labor, especially carrying heavy loads, humans would get injured less often. Though correlation doesn't necessarily mean causation, multiple reports have found that injury rates in Amazon warehouses have increased as more of its warehouses have become automated. (The retail giant says the rates have increased because of more accurate reporting.)
Bobby Gosvener went to work in fall 2020 at age 52 at a partially automated Amazon warehouse in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He told Insider he remembered the horde of "Roombas" (what he nicknamed Amazon's AGVs) and recalled days when he saw managers frazzled because most of the machines were busted.
One day, during the holiday rush, he said, he returned from a quick lunch break to his workstation on the warehouse mezzanine, where he made sure bins full of items coming down a conveyor belt were correctly loaded and oriented. Something had gone wrong with the machine — the bins got stuck and those backed up behind them fell off onto the floor.
If you're going to go to the bathroom, you better make it quick, because time off task could mean your job is going to be threatened.
Gosvener said he raced into action to get these heavy bins back on the belt while others fell off, spending sweat-soaked hours in perpetual motion. (Amazon, he said, had no intention of slowing or stopping the line during the Christmastime rush). Waking in agony the following day and unable to lift one arm, Gosvener was reassigned to light duty, such as performing COVID-19 checks on fellow employees, but he said he couldn't even do that without experiencing pain. Later, he'd discover he suffered a deep strain of the trapezius muscle. After a prolonged worker's-compensation battle to secure healthcare, he said, he's now on the road to recovery, a process he expects to take two years. (Amazon declined to respond to a request for comment.)
Looking back, Gosvener says it's clear why the rates of automation and warehouse injuries appear to be rising hand in hand. It's not so much that robots are running into humans and causing mayhem, he said, but rather a consequence of what the robots' arrival portends: an accelerating, ever-more-unforgiving pace of work and workplace culture.
"We have what's called 'time off task.' Your time is being measured, right down to the very minute," he said of Amazon's controversial time-tracking policy, in which workers have slivers of time a week to use the restroom or do other personal tasks. In the kind of partially automated warehouses that are becoming so common, Gosvener said, the tasks left to human workers are the ones that slow down the operations, which puts extra pressure on people to use every second productively. "And if you're going to go to the bathroom, you better make it quick, because time off task could mean your job is going to be threatened," he added.
But workers agree any help is better than none, especially knowing the tech can only get better
In the heyday of brick-and-mortar stores, shoppers provided the free labor of walking the aisles, picking the items they wanted, and carrying that stuff to the front for checkout. But online shopping shifts that work onto warehouses employees. "That rapid jump in how easy and convenient it is to order anything, anywhere, anytime — the supply chain and execution just was not ready," Vince Martinelli, the head of product and marketing at Righthand Robotics, told Insider. "It is still catching up."
In that environment, there's evidence workers are open to some help. A Harvard Business Review survey of 77 warehouse workers in 2022 found that they viewed automation in warehouses slightly more positively than negatively. While workers worried about job loss and dealing with tech malfunctions, they were optimistic that robots could make their work safer and more productive.
To the Cornell historian Hyman, this checks out. "It's a question of whether or not these kinds of tools are complements or substitutes," he said. In other words, warehouse robots are desirable as long as they're good enough to work alongside humans and shoulder some of the hard labor — but not good enough to replace us.
What robots still struggle with, for now
Robots are adept at tasks humans aren't built for, Hyman said, namely hauling heavy loads and instantly analyzing big data sets to make a warehouse work more efficiently. Yet they often struggle at tasks we find easy, especially seeing things and grabbing them.
Consider a box of 100 paper clips, Lawton said. This box of 100 is just one of many such boxes inside a medium-size box of boxes, and that box of boxes may be packed within an even larger container. A human warehouse worker asked to retrieve a box or two of 100 clips knows what to do: Our hands are adept and grasping, and if we need to open a new box of boxes to fulfill the order, that's simple, too.
Not so for a robot. Each part of the seemingly simple operation — seeing how many items are left in a box, knowing how to manipulate and open a box with a knife, and picking something up with enough force not to drop it, but not so much to crush it — is a wildly complex job for a robot, owing to how limited computerized vision and movement are compared with the human eye and hand.
Yet a complex job is not an impossible one. Righthand Robotics is one of the firms building robotic arms that can, thanks to ample training, machine learning, and computer vision, do the warehouse job of picking items and boxes out of bins. These stationary RightPick arms aren't equipped to handle large items or sort through a box of various items, Martinelli said.
Still, in a warehouse set up for their success, where the contents of each box are predictable and always put in the same place, the Righthand robots can out-pick a person, Martinelli said. After all, they never get tired. But creating that environment would force companies to remake the warehouse once again.
If robots can see and grab individual items, could they, someday soon, perform every task in the warehouse, essentially removing humans from the process? Lawton, for one, doesn't believe we're on the cusp of what people in the industry call "dark warehouses," populated only by machines that don't need light to work. He argues that humans will need to drive the forklifts that move large crates and oversize items, and that they're better at the "Tetris"-like game of packing and shipping items.
And, of course, they'll need to be around to fix the robots.