Safety
Reporting on Amazon's internal safety records found injury rates were higher at its heavily automated warehouses, where workers were expected to handle about 400 items an hour.
A crash, recall, injury or investigation
What the source says
“injury rates were higher at Amazon facilities that are heavily automated.”
What it means
Amazon warehouse robots, from Amazon, is at stage 5 of 5 on our ladder: regulator-cleared or mass market. Safety events don't move a stage on their own, but they stay on the robot's record.
Human help: Our sources report it working without human help.
More on Amazon warehouse robots
- Amazon stopped its Blue Jay project, a many-armed robot for sorting and moving packages, a few months after showing it in October 2025. It said the technology would be reused in other robots.
- Amazon said it had put its one millionth robot to work, in a warehouse in Japan.
- The Wall Street Journal reported that about 75% of Amazon's deliveries worldwide get some help from a robot along the way.
- Amazon showed Vulcan, a robot arm with force sensors that can 'feel' items it touches. It was already at work in Spokane, Washington, and Hamburg, Germany.
- Amazon announced 'next-generation' warehouses with ten times as many robots as its older sites, alongside human workers. The first opened in Shreveport, Louisiana.
- Amazon said its Sequoia system, which uses several kinds of robots to store and fetch stock, was working at a warehouse in Houston, Texas.