Your new robot coworkers are darling–and so efficient! They’ll relieve you of so many responsibilities. And, eventually, maybe all of them. For now, factory robots will reduce jobs only somewhat, as we work alongside them. But eventually the band will be broken up, the machines going solo. Even the workers manufacturing the robots will soon enough be robots.

In a Technology Review article, Tom Simonite takes a smart look at this transitional phase, as robots begin to gradually commandeer the warehouse. He focuses on Fetch, a company that makes robots versatile enough to be introduced into preexisting factories. An excerpt:

Freight is designed to help shelf pickers, who walk around warehouses pulling items off shelves to do things like fulfilling online shopping orders. As workers walk around gathering items from shelves, they can toss items into the crate carried by the robot. When an order is complete, a tap on a smartphone commands the robot to scoot its load off to its next destination.

Wise says that robot colleagues like these could make work easier for shelf pickers, who walk as much as 15 miles a day in some large warehouses. Turnover in such jobs is high, and warehouse operators struggle to fill positions, she says. “We can reduce that burden on people and have them focus on the things that humans are good at, like taking things off shelves,” says Wise.

However, Wise’s company is also working on a second robot designed to be good at that, too. It has a long, jointed arm with a gripper, is mounted on top of a wheeled base, and has a moving “head” with a depth camera similar to that found in the Kinect games controller. This robot, named Fetch, is intended to rove around a particular area of shelving, taking items down and dropping them into a crate carried by a Freight robot.•