Really good science fiction movies help us imagine a more exciting future, where giant robots engage in combat for our viewing pleasure or there's a cure for baldness. These films also remind us just how far those fantastic visions are from our more mundane reality. By now we should all own flying cars and be able to control machines with our minds. At the very least, we hoped by now to have artificially intelligent robots catering to our every whim. It turns out we're not far off from that particular future, at least when it comes to buying stuff.

If you work in any kind of storage facility or warehouse, there's a better chance every day that you're going to be working alongside robots. Magazino's TORU is a good example of the latest generation: navigating by sight, safe around humans, and simple to put to work. Laser rangers let it identify and roll around humans and unexpected obstacles, and there are no big, free arms to whack them with. No special beacons or reflectors are needed to tell the bot where it is, either; it checks its perceived environment against a stored map and deduces its position from that. A set of three TORUs are being delivered to the Fiege Mega Center, a major warehouse in Erfurt; the company's CEO, Jens Fiege, sounds appropriately thrilled in the press release: The robots of Magazino are an exciting project to digitise our warehouses even more.

Companies like Clearpath, Fetch, and Locus Robotics are doing some amazing work in order fulfillment and other warehouse tasks by developing mobile platforms that can autonomously and intelligently ferry items between locations. We don't want to minimize how much of a challenge this is, but at the same time, it's only half of the order fulfillment problem (and not the most difficult half). The hard part is getting those robots to pick items from shelves, and apparently it's really hard: Amazon (whose warehouse robots are capable of tranporting items but not picking them) is holding its second Picking Challenge at RoboCup this year, and even with teams of researchers all collaborating on picking tasks with very expensive robots, results have been good but not inspiring. German startup Magazino is another company trying to solve both problems. It has begun deploying a mobile warehouse robot called Toru designed to not only transport items but also pick them (some of them, anyway) directly off of shelves. They haven't completely solved the problem of humans, but it's a step in the right direction.