Human-Robot Interaction

The Missing Module

In 2019, the serious-injury rate at Amazon warehouses running robotic fulfillment systems was 7.9 per 100 workers, roughly 54 percent higher than at Amazon warehouses without robots, according to the Strategic Organizing Center’s analysis of OSHA filings first surfaced by the Center for Investigative Reporting’s Reveal. At the Tracy, California facility, the serious-injury rate nearly quadrupled in the four years after Kiva-style drive units were introduced.

The robots themselves did not injure workers. They set a pace of roughly 400 picks per hour against a pre-robot baseline of 100, and human bodies tried to match it. The injuries followed from how robots and humans had been arranged to share a workspace, which is a different engineering problem than building the robot.