Amazon has begun rolling out a "new worker safety wearable" to over 25 of its locations over the past year, TechCrunch reported on Friday--namely, a "Robotic Tech Vest" that alerts robots to the location of workers within a facility in order to prevent workplace accidents. The vest in question has built-in sensors that allow Amazon robots to detect obstacles (in this case, humans) and manoeuvre around them. "All of our robotic systems employ multiple safety systems ranging from training materials, to physical barriers to entry, to process controls, to on-board," Amazon Robotics VP Brad Porter told TechCrunch. "In the past, associates would mark out the grid of cells where they would be working in order to enable the robotic traffic planner to smartly route around that region. What the vest allows the robots to do is detect the human from farther away and smartly update its travel plan to steer clear without the need for the associate to explicitly mark out those zones."

As Amazon Inc. moves to shrink delivery times from days to hours, it's spreading its enormous inventory across a growing network of fulfillment centers on the outskirts of the nation's biggest cities. Within this strategy, San Bernardino has emerged as a key player thanks to its abundance of affordable land, proximity to ports and access to one of the nation's biggest consumer markets. Amazon this week doubled down on the city 60 miles east of Los Angeles by announcing plans for its second fulfillment center there, a cavernous 1.1-million-square-foot facility that will briefly warehouse items such as books, electronics and toys while adding 1,000 new full-time jobs. "San Bernardino has proven to be an important part of Amazon's growth in California, and we are proud to continue creating jobs and helping support the economy here in the Inland Empire," Akash Chauhan, Amazon's vice president of North American operations, said in a prepared statement. The new facility will be Amazon's fifth fulfillment center in the Inland Empire and seventh in California.