Amazon’s Growing Robot Army Keeps Warehouses Humming

While Amazon.com Inc. counts more than 100,000 mobile robots as part of its workforce, there is still a human touch.

“I don’t think Amazon has figured out how to automate packing,” Scott Anderson, director of Amazon Robotics LLC’s fulfillment center operations, said during a tour of Amazon’s Baltimore warehouse. The site packs and ships tens of thousands of packages every day.

Anderson said it could take a decade or more for the retail giant to automate the process of packing merchandise into boxes or putting goods onto shelves, where they wait for customers to place an order. Humans are better ...