Shipping and warehouse management
An Amazon sorting facility is one of the best examples of the symbiotic relationship that is forming between humans, computers, and robots. Computers take customer orders and decide where to route merchandise, the robots act as mules carrying the pallets and inventory around the warehouse. Humans plug the "last mile" problem by hand picking the items that are going into each order. Robots are proficient in mindlessly repeating a task many times as long as there is a pattern involved and some level of pretraining is involved to achieve this. However, having a robot pick a 20-pound package and immediately being able to grab an egg without breaking it is one of the harder robotics problems.
Robots struggle dealing with objects of different sizes, weights, shapes, and fragility; a task that many humans can perform effortlessly. People, therefore, handle the tasks that the robots encounter difficulty with. The interaction of these three types of different actors translates into a finely tuned orchestra that can deliver millions of packages everyday with very little mistakes.
Even Scott Anderson, Amazon's director of robotics fulfillment acknowledged in May 2019 that a fully automated warehouse is at least 10 years away. So, we will continue to see this configuration in warehouses across the world for a little longer.
