Brad Porter knows a few things about putting robots to work. These machines, which include robotic arms capable of seeing and grasping items from conveyors, and mobile robots that work in close proximity to humans, have allowed Amazon to redesign its fulfillment centers to be more automated. They've also accelerated processing and delivery times, and--of course--improved profit margins. Porter now leads Cobot, a company that aims to help other companies increase their robotic workforces, too. Cobot's first product is Proxie, a two-armed, four-wheeled warehouse robot that looks a bit like a mobile hatstand.

At first glance, this warehouse looks like many: Forklifts unload pallets from the back of dozens of tractor-trailers. Store-bound merchandise gets sorted by department and store aisle before getting stacked high like an elaborate game of Tetris. Tasks are powered by giant automated claws and rolling robots, instead of people. The driver's seats on the forklifts are empty. Welcome to the future of Walmart.

When Masaya Aso worked on autonomous driving technology at Bosch in Japan and Germany, he realized that "many tasks were still manual as over 85% of warehouses have almost no automation at all." To help address the problem, Aso co-founded LexxPluss, a now two-year-old, Japan-based startup that designs and develop autonomous mobile robots to transport loads and optimize workflows within warehouses and logistic sites. Aso, who is CEO of the outfit, co-founded it with robotics and autonomous vehicle veterans from Bosch, Amazon, Honda and more, and now the Japanese outfit is preparing to enter the U.S. with a fresh injection of about $10.7 million (1.45 billion JPY) of Series A funding that values the company at approximately $38.8 million (5.26 billion yen). Drone Fund led the latest financing along with SOSV's HAX, Incubate Fund, SBI investment and DBJ Capital. LexxPlus initially targeted the logistics and automotive manufacturing spaces because those spaces are actively deploying robots beyond their production lines.

In 2019, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos predicted that within a decade, robotic systems will be advanced enough to grasp items with the dexterity of a human hand. Three years later, Amazon looks to be making progress toward that goal. A recent video published on the company's science blog features a new "pinch-grasping" robot system that could one day do a lot of the work that humans in Amazon warehouses do today. Or, potentially, help workers do their jobs more easily. The topic of warehouse automation is more relevant than ever in the retail and e-commerce industries, especially for Amazon, which is the largest online retailer and the second-largest private sector employer in the US.

More than a decade ago, Ted Adelson set out to create tactile sensors for robots that would give them a sense of touch. A handheld imaging system powerful enough to visualize the raised print on a dollar bill. The technology was spun into GelSight, to answer an industry need for low-cost, high-resolution imaging. An expert in both human and machine vision, Adelson was pleased to have created something useful. But he never lost sight of his original dream: to endow robots with a sense of touch.

What happens to jobs, the economy and business when a company can create the perfect worker out of silicon and steel? Amazon's new warehouse robots, unveiled this week, could have lasting implications for the company and its workforce at a pivotal moment for technology and the labor movement. In addition to developing and deploying its own fleet of robots, Amazon is keeping an eye on technology that's further out on the horizon, as demonstrated by its investment in Agility Robotics, maker of a bipedal warehouse robot called Digit. Amazon says it sees immense long-term benefits for worker safety, productivity and efficiency, with robots ultimately helping humans do better and more fulfilling work, not taking their jobs. The company points to the fact that it has hired a million people in the past decade, more than twice the number of robots in its operations. "We build our machines so that humans are at the center of the robotics universe," said Tye Brady, chief technologist for Amazon Robotics, unveiling the new robots on stage in Las Vegas this week at re:MARS, an Amazon conference focusing on machine learning, automation, robotics and space.

Rodney Brooks knows a fair bit about robots. Besides being a pioneer of academic robotics research, he has founded companies that have given the world the robot vacuum cleaner, the bomb disposal bot, and a factory robot anyone can program. Now Brooks wants to introduce another revolutionary type of robot helper--a mobile warehouse robot with the ability to read human body language to tell what workers around it are doing. Robots are increasingly working in close proximity to humans, and finding ways to maximize human-machine teamwork could help companies boost productivity and perhaps lead to new kinds of jobs rather than robots replacing people. But giving robots the ability to read human cues is far from easy.

Lior Elazary believes that robots are a net positive for humans. That's a good thing, because he is the CEO of InVia Robotics and offers a robots-as-a-service platform that can 5-10X productivity in shipping and receiving warehouses. And presumably, he wants to sleep at night. The question, however, remains: is Elazary right? "A lot of people don't realize how gruesome it is to work inside the warehouse," Elazary told me recently in a TechFirst podcast.

Pick-and-place robotic arms for packing boxes in warehouses can now work more than 350 times faster because of a neural network that predicts how quickly they can safely transport items. The coronavirus pandemic has led to a surge in online shopping. "Vendors are having a very difficult time meeting the demand," says Ken Goldberg at the University of California, Berkeley. Goldberg's lab has previously produced software that improves the grasping ability of a type of robotic arm often deployed in warehouses, using computer vision to identify where in three-dimensional space an object to be grasped is relative to the robot's claw. "Now the bottleneck has moved over to the motion side of things, when the object is in the grasp," says Jeffrey Ichnowski, also at Berkeley.

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.