At an event in Dortmund, Germany today, Amazon announced a new robotic system called Vulcan, which the company is calling “its first robotic system with a genuine sense of touch—designed to transform how robots interact with the physical world.” In the short to medium term, the physical world that Amazon is most concerned with is its warehouses, and Vulcan is designed to assist (or take over, depending on your perspective) with stowing and picking items in its mobile robotic inventory system. Related: Amazon’s Vulcan Robots Are Mastering Picking Packages In two upcoming papers in IEEE Transactions on Robotics, Amazon researchers describe how both the stowing and picking side of the system operates. We covered stowing in detail a couple of years ago, when we spoke with Aaron Parness, the director of applied science at Amazon Robotics. Parness and his team have made a lot of progress on stowing since then, improving speed and reliability over more than 500,000 stows in operational warehouses to the point where the average stowing robot is now slightly faster than the average stowing human. We spoke with Parness to get an update on stowing, as well as an in-depth look at how Vulcan handles picking, which you can find in this separate article. It’s a much different problem, and well worth a read. Optimizing Amazon’s Stowing Process Stowing is the process by which Amazon brings products into its warehouses and adds them to its inventory so that you can order them. Not surprisingly, Amazon has gone to extreme lengths to optimize this process to maximize efficiency in both space and time. Human stowers are presented with a mobile robotic pod full of fabric cubbies (bins) with elastic bands across the front of them to keep stuff from falling out. The human’s job is to find a promising space in a bin, pull the plastic band aside, and stuff the thing into that space. The item’s new home is recorded in Amazon’s system, the pod then drives back into the warehouse, and the next pod comes along, ready for the next item. Different manipulation tools are used to interact with human-optimized bins.Amazon The new paper on stowing includes some interesting numbers about Amazon’s inventory-handling process that helps put the scale of the problem in perspective. More than 14 billion items are stowed by hand every year at Amazon warehouses. Amazon is hoping that Vulcan robots will be able to stow 80 percent of these items at a rate of 300 items per hour, while operating 20 hours per day. It’s a very, very high bar. After a lot of practice, Amazon’s robots are now quite good at the stowing task. Parness tells us that the stow system is operating three times as fast as it was 18 months ago, meaning that it’s actually a little bit faster than an average human. This is exciting, but as Parness explains, expert humans still put the robots to shame. “The fastest humans at this task are like Olympic athletes. They’re far faster than the robots, and they’re able to store items in pods at much higher densities.” High density is important because it means that more stuff can fit into warehouses that are physically closer to more people, which is especially relevant in urban areas where space is at a premium. The best humans can get very creative when it comes to this physical three-dimensional “Tetris-ing,” which the robots are still working on. Where robots do excel is planning ahead, and this is likely why the average robot stower is now able to outpace the average human stower—Tetris-ing is a mental process, too. In the same way that good Tetris players are thinking about where the next piece is going to go, not just the current piece, robots are able to leverage a lot more information than humans can to optimize what gets stowed where and when, says Parness. “When you’re a person doing this task, you’ve got a buffer of 20 or 30 items, and you’re looking for an opportunity to fit those items into different bins, and having to remember which item might go into which space. But the robot knows all of the properties of all of our items at once, and we can also look at all of the bins at the same time along with the bins in the next couple of pods that are coming up. So we can do this optimization over the whole set of information in 100 milliseconds.” Essentially, robots are far better at optimization within the planning side of Tetrising, while humans are (still) far better at the manipulation side, but that gap is closing as robots get more experienced at operating in clutter and contact. Amazon has had Vulcan stowing robots operating for over a year in live warehouses in Germany and Washington state to collect training data, and those robots have successfully stowed hundreds of thousands of items. Stowing is of course only half of what Vulcan is designed to do. Picking offers all kinds of unique challenges too, and you can read our in-depth discussion with Parness on that topic right here.

As far as I can make out, Amazon’s warehouses are highly structured, extremely organized, very tidy, absolute raging messes. Everything in an Amazon warehouse is (usually) exactly where it’s supposed to be, which is typically jammed into some pseudorandom fabric bin the size of a shoebox along with a bunch of other pseudorandom crap. Somehow, this turns out to be the most space- and time-efficient way of doing things, because (as we’ve written about before) you have to consider the process of stowing items away in a warehouse as well as the process of picking them, and that involves some compromises in favor of space and speed. For humans, this isn’t so much of a problem. When someone orders something on Amazon, a human can root around in those bins, shove some things out of the way, and then pull out the item that they’re looking for. This is exactly the sort of thing that robots tend to be terrible at, because not only is this process slightly different every single time, it’s also very hard to define exactly how humans go about it. Related: Amazon’s Vulcan Robots Now Stow Items Faster Than Humans As you might expect, Amazon has been working very very hard on this picking problem. Today at an event in Germany, the company announced Vulcan, a robotic system that can both stow and pick items at human(ish) speeds. Last time we talked with Aaron Parness, the director of applied science at Amazon Robotics, our conversation was focused on stowing—putting items into bins. As part of today’s announcement, Amazon revealed that its robots are now slightly faster at stowing than the average human is. But in the stow context, there’s a limited amount that a robot really has to understand about what’s actually happening in the bin. Fundamentally, the stowing robot’s job is to squoosh whatever is currently in a bin as far to one side as possible in order to make enough room to cram a new item in. As long as the robot is at least somewhat careful not to crushify anything, it’s a relatively straightforward task, at least compared to picking. The choices made when an item is stowed into a bin will affect how hard it is to get that item out of that bin later on—this is called “bin etiquette.” Amazon is trying to learn bin etiquette with AI to make picking more efficient.Amazon The defining problem of picking, as far as robots are concerned, is sensing and manipulation in clutter. “It’s a naturally contact-rich task, and we have to plan on that contact and react to it,” Parness says. And it’s not enough to solve these problems slowly and carefully, because Amazon Robotics is trying to put robots in production, which means that its systems are being directly compared to a not-so-small army of humans who are doing this exact same job very efficiently. “There’s a new science challenge here, which is to identify the right item,” explains Parness. The thing to understand about identifying items in an Amazon warehouse is that there are a lot of them: something like 400 million unique items. One single floor of an Amazon warehouse can easily contain 15,000 pods, which is over a million bins, and Amazon has several hundred warehouses. This is a lot of stuff. In theory, Amazon knows exactly which items are in every single bin. Amazon also knows (again, in theory), the weight and dimensions of each of those items, and probably has some pictures of each item from previous times that the item has been stowed or picked. This is a great starting point for item identification, but as Parness points out, “We have lots of items that aren’t feature rich—imagine all of the different things you might get in a brown cardboard box.” Clutter and Contact As challenging as it is to correctly identify an item in a bin that may be stuffed to the brim with nearly identical items, an even bigger challenge is actually getting that item that you just identified out of the bin. The hardware and software that humans have for doing this task is unmatched by any robot, which is always a problem, but the real complicating factor is dealing with items that are all jumbled together in a small fabric bin. And the picking process itself involves more than just extraction—once the item is out of the bin, you then have to get it to the next order-fulfillment step, which means dropping it into another bin or putting it on a conveyor or something. “When we were originally starting out, we assumed we’d have to carry the item over some distance after we pulled it out of the bin,” explains Parness. “So we were thinking we needed pinch grasping.” A pinch grasp is when you grab something between a finger (or fingers) and your thumb, and at least for humans, it’s a versatile and reliable way of grabbing a wide variety of stuff. But as Parness notes, for robots in this context, it’s more complicated: “Even pinch grasping is not ideal because if you pinch the edge of a book, or the end of a plastic bag with something inside it, you don’t have pose control of the item and it may flop around unpredictably.” At some point, Parness and his team realized that while an item did have to move farther than just out of the bin, it didn’t actually have to get moved by the picking robot itself. Instead, they came up with a lifting conveyor that positions itself directly outside of the bin being picked from, so that all the robot has to do is get the item out of the bin and onto the conveyor. “It doesn’t look that graceful right now,” admits Parness, but it’s a clever use of hardware to substantially simplify the manipulation problem, and has the side benefit of allowing the robot to work more efficiently, since the conveyor can move the item along while the arm starts working on the next pick. Amazon’s robots have different techniques for extracting items from bins, using different gripping hardware depending on what needs to be picked. The type of end effector that the system chooses and the grasping approach depend on what the item is, where it is in the bin, and also what it’s next to. It’s a complicated planning problem that Amazon is tackling with AI, as Parness explains. “We’re starting to build foundation models of items, including properties like how squishy they are, how fragile they are, and whether they tend to get stuck on other items or no. So we’re trying to learn those things, and it’s early stage for us, but we think reasoning about item properties is going to be important to get to that level of reliability that we need.” Reliability has to be superhigh for Amazon (and with many other commercial robotic deployments) simply because small errors multiplied over huge deployments result in an unacceptable amount of screwing up. There’s a very, very long tail of unusual things that Amazon’s robots might encounter when trying to extract an item from a bin. Even if there’s some particularly weird bin situation that might only show up once in a million picks, that still ends up happening many times per day on the scale at which Amazon operates. Fortunately for Amazon, they’ve got humans around, and part of the reason that this robotic system can be effective in production at all is that if the robot gets stuck, or even just sees a bin that it knows is likely to cause problems, it can just give up, route that particular item to a human picker, and move on to the next one. The other new technique that Amazon is implementing is a sort of modern approach to “visual servoing,” where the robot watches itself move and then adjusts its movement based on what it sees. As Parness explains: “It’s an important capability because it allows us to catch problems before they happen. I think that’s probably our biggest innovation, and it spans not just our problem, but problems across robotics.” A (More) Automated Future Parness was very clear that (for better or worse) Amazon isn’t thinking about its stowing and picking robots in terms of replacing humans completely. There’s that long tail of items that need a human touch, and it’s frankly hard to imagine any robotic-manipulation system capable enough to make at least occasional human help unnecessary in an environment like an Amazon warehouse, which somehow manages to maximize organization and chaos at the same time. These stowing and picking robots have been undergoing live testing in an Amazon warehouse in Germany for the past year, where they’re already demonstrating ways in which human workers could directly benefit from their presence. For example, Amazon pods can be up to 2.5 meters tall, meaning that human workers need to use a stepladder to reach the highest bins and bend down to reach the lowest ones. If the robots were primarily tasked with interacting with these bins, it would help humans work faster while putting less stress on their bodies. With the robots so far managing to keep up with human workers, Parness tells us that the emphasis going forward will be primarily on getting better at not screwing up: “I think our speed is in a really good spot. The thing we’re focused on now is getting that last bit of reliability, and that will be our next year of work.” While it may seem like Amazon is optimizing for its own very specific use cases, Parness reiterates that the bigger picture here is using every last one of those 400 million items jumbled into bins as a unique opportunity to do fundamental research on fast, reliable manipulation in complex environments. “If you can build the science to handle high contact and high clutter, we’re going to use it everywhere,” says Parness. “It’s going to be useful for everything, from warehouses to your own home. What we’re working on now are just the first problems that are forcing us to develop these capabilities, but I think it’s the future of robotic manipulation.”

Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper, or Katherine Johnson, but there are many other women in engineering you should know about. Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering, and Technology, in Kansas City, Mo., and I’m currently working through the unpublished papers of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (a predecessor of today’s IEEE). These papers consist of conference presentations and keynote addresses that weren’t included in the society’s journals. They take up about 14 shelves in the closed stacks at the Linda Hall. Most of the content is unavailable on the Internet or anywhere else. No amount of Googling or prompting ChatGPT will reveal this history. The only way to discover it is to go to the library in person and leaf through the papers. This is what history research looks like. It is time intensive and can’t be easily replaced by AI (at least not yet). fellowship with the National Endowment for the Humanities. My fellowship was supposed to run through mid-June, but the grant was terminated early. Maybe you don’t care about my research, but I’m not alone. Almost all NEH grants were similarly cut, as were thousands of research grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Drastic research cuts have also been made or are expected at the Departments of Defense, Energy, Commerce, and Education. I could keep going. This is what history research looks like. There’s been plenty of outrage all around, but as an engineer turned historian who now studies engineers of the past, I have a particular plea: Engineers and computer scientists, please defend humanities research just as loudly as you might defend research in STEM fields. Why? Because if you take a moment to reflect on your training, conduct, and professional identity, you may realize that you owe much of this to the humanities. Engineering’s Historical Ties to the Humanities Granted, the humanities have a few thousand years on engineering when it comes to formal study. Plato and Aristotle were mainly into philosophy, even when they were chatting about science-y stuff. Formal technical education in the United States didn’t begin until the founding of the U.S. Military Academy, in West Point, N.Y., in 1802. Two decades later came what is now Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in Troy, N.Y. Dedicated to “the application of science to the common purposes of life,” Rensselaer was the first school in the English-speaking world established to teach engineering—in this case, civil engineering. One consistent trend throughout the 20th century is the high level of anxiety over what it means to be an engineer. In addition to looking at the unpublished papers, I’ve been paging through the entire run of journals from the AIEE, the Institute of Radio Engineers (the other predecessor of the IEEE), and the IEEE. And so I have a good sense of the evolution of the profession. One consistent, yet surprising, trend throughout the 20th century is the high level of anxiety over what it means to be an engineer. Who exactly are we? Early on, electrical engineers looked to the medical and legal fields to see how to organize, form professional societies, and create codes of ethics. They debated the difference between training for a technician versus an engineer. They worried about being too high-minded, but also being seen as getting their hands dirty in the machine shop. During the Great Depression and other times of economic downturn, there were lengthy discussions on organizing into unions. Thomas L. Martin Jr., dean of engineering at the University of Arizona, endorsed this engineering curriculum, in which the humanities accounted for 24 of 89 credits. AIEE What an Engineering Education Should Be Here’s what that meant in practice. In 1909, none other than Charles Proteus Steinmetz advocated for including the classics in engineering education. An education too focused on empirical science and engineering was “liable to make the man one sided.” Indeed, he contended, “this neglect of the classics is one of the most serious mistakes of modern education.” RELATED: The First Virtual Meeting Was in 1916 In the 1930s, William Wickenden, president of the Case School of Applied Science at Case Western Reserve University, in Cleveland, wrote an influential report on engineering education, in which he argued that at least one-fifth of an engineering curriculum should be devoted to the study of the humanities and social sciences. After World War II and the deployment of the atomic bomb, the start of the Cold War, and the U.S. entry into the Vietnam War, the study of the humanities within engineering seemed even more pressing. In 1961, C.R. Vail, a professor at Duke University, in Durham, N.C., railed against “culturally semiliterate engineering graduates who...could be immediately useful in routine engineering activity, but who were incapable of creatively applying fundamental physical concepts to the solution of problems imposed by emerging new technologies.” In his opinion, the inclusion of a full year of humanities coursework would stimulate the engineer’s aesthetic, ethical, intellectual, and spiritual growth. Thus prepared, future engineers would be able “to recognize the sociological consequences of their technological achievements and to feel a genuine concern toward the great dilemmas which confront mankind.” In a similar vein, Thomas L. Martin Jr., dean of engineering at the University of Arizona, proposed an engineering curriculum in which the humanities and social sciences accounted for 24 of the 89 credits. Many engineers of that era thought it was their duty to stand up for their beliefs. Engineers in industry also had opinions on the humanities. James Young, an engineer with General Electric, argued that engineers need “an awareness of the social forces, the humanities, and their relationship to his professional field, if he is to ascertain areas of potential impact or conflict.” He urged engineers to participate in society, whether in the affairs of the neighborhood or the nation. “As an educated man,” the engineer “has more than casual or average responsibility to protect this nation’s heritage of integrity and morality,” Young believed. Of course, here in the United States, we still live in a democratic society, one that constitutionally protects the freedoms of speech, assembly, and petitioning the government for a redress of grievances. And yet, anecdotally, I’ve observed that engineers today are more reticent than others to engage in public discourse or protest. Nobody can say what will happen next, but I’d like to think this will be one of those times when the past is prologue. And so I’ll repeat my plea to my engineering colleagues: Please don’t turn your back on the humanities. Embrace the moral center that your professional forebears believed all engineers should foster throughout their careers. Stand up for both engineering and the humanities. They are not separate and separable enterprises. They are beautifully entangled and dependent on each other. Both are needed for civilization to flourish. Both are needed for a better tomorrow. References With the exception of Charles Proteus Steinmetz’s “The Value of the Classics in Engineering Education,” which is available in IEEE Xplore, and William Wickenden’s Report of the Investigation of Engineering Education, which is available on the Internet Archive, all of the papers and talks quoted above come from the unpublished papers of the AIEE and unpublished papers of the IEEE. The former Engineering Societies Library, which was based in New York City, bound these papers into volumes. They aren’t digitized and probably never will be; you’ll have to go to the Linda Hall Library in Kansas City, Mo., to check them out. But if you’d like to learn more about how past engineers embraced the humanities, check out Matthew Wisnioski’s book Engineers for Change: Competing Visions of Technology in 1960s America (MIT Press, 2016) and W. Patrick McCray’s Making Art Work: How Cold War Engineers and Artists Forged a New Creative Culture (MIT Press, 2020).

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion. ICUAS 2025: 14–17 May 2025, CHARLOTTE, N.C. ICRA 2025: 19–23 May 2025, ATLANTA London Humanoids Summit: 29–30 May 2025, LONDON IEEE RCAR 2025: 1–6 June 2025, TOYAMA, JAPAN 2025 Energy Drone & Robotics Summit: 16–18 June 2025, HOUSTON RSS 2025: 21–25 June 2025, LOS ANGELES ETH Robotics Summer School: 21–27 June 2025, GENEVA IAS 2025: 30 June–4 July 2025, GENOA, ITALY ICRES 2025: 3–4 July 2025, PORTO, PORTUGAL IEEE World Haptics: 8–11 July 2025, SUWON, SOUTH KOREA IFAC Symposium on Robotics: 15–18 July 2025, PARIS RoboCup 2025: 15–21 July 2025, BAHIA, BRAZIL RO-MAN 2025: 25–29 August 2025, EINDHOVEN, THE NETHERLANDS CLAWAR 2025: 5–7 September 2025, SHENZHEN CoRL 2025: 27–30 September 2025, SEOUL IEEE Humanoids: 30 September–2 October 2025, SEOUL World Robot Summit: 10–12 October 2025, OSAKA, JAPAN IROS 2025: 19–25 October 2025, HANGZHOU, CHINA Enjoy today’s videos! The LYNX M20 series represents the world’s first wheeled-legged robot built specifically for challenging terrains and hazardous environments during industrial operation. Featuring lightweight design with extreme-environment endurance, it conquers rugged mountain trails, muddy wetlands and debris-strewn ruins—pioneering embodied intelligence in power inspection, emergency response, logistics, and scientific exploration. [ DEEP Robotics ] The latest OK Go music video includes lots of robots. And here’s a bit more on how it was done, mostly with arms from Universal Robots. [ OK Go ] Despite significant interest and advancements in humanoid robotics, most existing commercially available hardware remains high-cost, closed-source, and nontransparent within the robotics community. This lack of accessibility and customization hinders the growth of the field and the broader development of humanoid technologies. To address these challenges and promote democratization in humanoid robotics, we demonstrate Berkeley Humanoid Lite, an open-source humanoid robot designed to be accessible, customizable, and beneficial for the entire community. [ Berkeley Humanoid Lite ] I think this may be the first time I’ve ever seen a pedestal-mounted Atlas from Boston Dynamics. [ NVIDIA ] We are increasingly adopting domestic robots (Roomba, for example) that provide relief from mundane household tasks. However, these robots usually only spend little time executing their specific task and remain idle for long periods. Our work explores this untapped potential of domestic robots in ubiquitous computing, focusing on how they can improve and support modern lifestyles. [ University of Bath ] Whenever I see a soft robot, I have to ask, “Okay, but how soft is it really?” And usually, there’s a pump or something hidden away off-camera somewhere. So it’s always cool to see actually soft robotics actuators, like these, which are based on phase-changing water. [ Nature Communications ] via [ Collaborative Robotics Laboratory, University of Coimbra ] Thanks, Pedro! Pruning is an essential agricultural practice for orchards. Robot manipulators have been developed as an automated solution for this repetitive task, which typically requires seasonal labor with specialized skills. Our work addresses the behavior planning challenge for a robotic pruning system, which entails a multilevel planning problem in environments with complex collisions. In this article, we formulate the planning problem for a high-dimensional robotic arm in a pruning scenario, investigate the system’s intrinsic redundancies, and propose a comprehensive pruning workflow that integrates perception, modeling, and holistic planning. [ Paper ] via [ IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine ] Thanks, Bram! Watch the Waymo Driver quickly react to potential hazards and avoid collisions with other road users, making streets safer in cities where it operates. [ Waymo ] This video showcases some of the early testing footage of HARRI (High-speed Adaptive Robot for Robust Interactions), a next-generation proprioceptive robotic manipulator developed at the Robotics & Mechanisms Laboratory (RoMeLa) at University of California, Los Angeles. Designed for dynamic and force-critical tasks, HARRI leverages quasi-direct drive proprioceptive actuators combined with advanced control strategies such as impedance control and real-time model predictive control (MPC) to achieve high-speed, precise, and safe manipulation in human-centric and unstructured environments. [ Robotics & Mechanisms Laboratory ] Building on reinforcement learning for natural gait, we’ve upped the challenge for Adam: introducing complex terrain in training to adapt to real-world surfaces. From steep slopes to start-stop inclines, Adam handles it all with ease! [ PNDbotics ] ABB Robotics is serving up the future of fast food with BurgerBots—a groundbreaking new restaurant concept launched in Los Gatos, Calif. Designed to deliver perfectly cooked, made-to-order burgers every time, the automated kitchen uses ABB’s IRB 360 FlexPicker and YuMi collaborative robot to assemble meals with precision and speed, while accurately monitoring stock levels and freeing staff to focus on customer experience. [ Burger Bots ] Look at this little guy, such a jaunty walk! [ Science Advances ] General-purpose humanoid robots are expected to interact intuitively with humans, enabling seamless integration into daily life. Natural language provides the most accessible medium for this purpose. In this work, we present an end-to-end, language-directed policy for real-world humanoid whole-body control. [ Hybrid Robotics ] It’s debatable whether this is technically a robot, but sure, let’s go with it, because it’s pretty neat—a cable car of sorts consisting of a soft twisted ring that’s powered by infrared light. [ North Carolina State University ] Robert Playter, CEO of Boston Dynamics, discusses the future of robotics amid rising competition and advances in artificial intelligence. [ Bloomberg ] AI is at the forefront of technological advances and is also reshaping creativity, ownership, and societal interactions. In episode 7 of Penn Engineering’s Innovation & Impact podcast, host Vijay Kumar, Nemirovsky Family dean of Penn Engineering and professor in mechanical engineering and applied mechanics, speaks with Meta’s chief AI scientist and Turing Award winner Yann LeCun about the journey of AI, how we define intelligence, and the possibilities and challenges it presents. [ University of Pennsylvania ]

I come from dairy-farming stock. My grandfather, the original Harry Goldstein, owned a herd of dairy cows and a creamery in Louisville, Ky., that bore the family name. One fateful day in early April 1944, Harry was milking his cows when a heavy metallic part of his homemade milking contraption—likely some version of the then-popular Surge Bucket Milker—struck him in the abdomen, causing a blood clot that ultimately led to cardiac arrest and his subsequent demise a few days later, at the age of 48. Fast forward 80 years and dairy farming is still a dangerous occupation. According to an analysis of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data done by the advocacy group Farmworker Justice, the U.S. dairy industry recorded 223 injuries per 10,000 full-time workers in 2020, almost double the rate for all of private industry combined. Contact with animals tops the list of occupational hazards for dairy workers, followed by slips, trips, and falls. Other significant risks include contact with objects or equipment, overexertion, and exposure to toxic substances. Every year, a few dozen dairy workers in the United States meet a fate similar to my grandfather’s, with 31 reported deadly accidents on dairy farms in 2021. As Senior Editor Evan Ackerman notes in “Robots for Cows (and Their Humans)”, traditional dairy farming is very labor-intensive. Cows need to be milked at least twice per day to prevent discomfort. Conventional milking facilities are engineered for human efficiency, with systems like rotating carousels that bring the cows to the dairy workers. The robotic systems that Netherlands-based Lely has been developing since the early 1990s are much more about doing things the bovine way. That includes letting the cows choose when to visit the milking robot, resulting in a happier herd and up to 10 percent more milk production. Turns out that what’s good for the cows might be good for the humans, too. Another Lely bot deals with feeding, while yet another mops up the manure, the proximate cause of much of the slipping and sliding that can result in injuries. The robots tend to reset the cow–human relationship—it becomes less adversarial because the humans aren’t always there bossing the cows around. Farmer well-being is also enhanced because the humans don’t have to be around to tempt fate, and they can spend time doing other things, freed up by the robot laborers. In fact, when Ackerman visited Lely’s demonstration farm in Schipluiden, Netherlands, to see the Lely robots in action, he says, “The original plan was for me to interview the farmer, and he was just not there at all for the entire visit while the cows were getting milked by the robots. In retrospect, that might have been the most effective way he could communicate how these robots are changing work for dairy farmers.” The farmer’s absence also speaks volumes about how far dairy technology has evolved since my grandfather’s day. Harry Goldstein’s life was cut short by the very equipment he hacked to make his own work easier. Today’s dairy-farming innovations aren’t just improving efficiency—they’re keeping humans out of harm’s way entirely. In the dairy farms of the future, the most valuable safety features might simply be a barn resounding with the whirring of robots and moos of contentment.