Robots Struggle to Match Warehouse Workers on ‘Really Hard’ Jobs

The machines can load and unload trucks, move goods and do other repetitive tasks but are stymied by some, like picking items from a pile.

In the outbound dock of an Amazon warehouse near Nashville, a robotic arm named Cardinal on a recent day stacked packages, Tetris-style, into six-and-a-half-foot-high carts. Then Proteus, an autonomous platform, moved the carts to the loading bay, flashing electronic eyes designed to make the robot more appealing to human colleagues.

As robots become more capable, they are performing an increasing number of tasks in warehouses and delivery centers with varying degrees of aptitude and speed. Machines can load and unload trucks. They can place goods on pallets and take them off. Robots can shift items around in inventory, pick up packages and move goods on warehouse floors. And they can do all this without a human minder guiding their every move.

Yet, even though robots are starting to take over some repetitive and cumbersome jobs, there are still many tasks they are not good at, making it difficult to know when or if robots will be able to fully automate this industry.

Despite the rise in automation, warehouses remain big employers of humans. Federal data show that nearly 1.8 million people work in this corner of the supply chain. While that number is down 9 percent from its peak in 2022, when logistics companies went on a hiring spree to handle the pandemic e-commerce boom, it is still up more than 30 percent since early 2020.

There are many crucial, simple tasks that humans are far better at. They can reach into a container of many items and move some out the way to extract the piece they want, a task industry officials refer to as picking. Robotics engineers struggle to say when their creations will be able to do that fast enough to be viable replacements for human workers.