Inbound Logistics’ September feature on the “connected warehouse” reports that highly automated sites remain rare—about 6 percent—while more than 60 percent of warehouses are still fully manual, even though most operators plan some automation by 2028. The article treats integration, not hardware novelty, as the next constraint. DHL’s large Locus AMR fleet is used as the live example: thousands of robots coordinated by LocusONE, which uses AI trained on billions of picks to group orders, cut travel, and treat the fleet as one system.
Each robot picks in-aisle from totes, finishes an order, drops at a conveyor, rack, or pack station, then loops back. Locus Array, introduced earlier in 2026, adds robotic manipulation so robots-to-goods work can retrieve items and deliver completed orders with less human handling; LocusONE can also pre-position totes from demand forecasts. The company acquired Nexera Robotics to widen grasping range.
Other threads in the same article include Ryder’s humanoid pilots for container-to-repack work, KION virtual commissioning of autonomous trucks from a scanned 3D warehouse map so go-live drops from weeks to days, KION’s STILL AXL approach to trailer loading with camera-based checks that a person is not inside the trailer, and Big Joe’s vision-plus-embodied-AI forklifts that can engage slightly misplaced pallets at high success rates. Vecna’s CaseFlow is cited for B2B case picking where pallets, not small parcels, dominate, including a voice layer for cold rooms. SEER Robotics and SVT-style interoperability software appear as answers to the “many robot brands, many control stacks” problem.
The through-line is that AGV, AMR, AS/RS, dock loading, and WMS only pay off when fleet orchestration and existing warehouse systems talk to each other.