Weeks after a study revealed that Amazon warehouse workers are injured at higher rates than staff at rival firms, the company has revealed it's testing new robots designed to improve employee safety. The e-commerce giant has ingratiatingly named two of the bots after Sesame Street's Bert and Ernie. Bert is an Autonomous Mobile Robot (AMR) that's built to navigate through Amazon facilities. In the future, the company envisions the bot carrying large and heavy items or carts across a site, reducing the strain on its human coworkers. Ernie, meanwhile, is a workstation system that removes totes from robotic shelves and then deliveries them to employees.

Amazon.com is still figuring out how to use robots to fill store shelves, but it's about done with clerks. Next year, the company will open a convenience store in Seattle where shoppers can walk in, take what they want -- and leave. The Amazon Go store is on the corner of 7th Avenue and Blanchard Street in Seattle, in the heart of Amazon's new campus development and a few blocks from the company's headquarters. Amazon wants people to walk in to the store and then just walk out with what they want. To figure out who to charge, and how much, Amazon will identify shoppers by scanning QR codes on their phones as they walk in, and use sensors and computer vision technology to determine which items they take.