[mdonahoe]

Robots are better at specialized, repeatable tasks. In Kiva's case, they developed robots that interact with exclusively pods, not the warehouse items themselves.

Creating a grasping robot that can recognize, lift and efficiently pack the thousands of different objects in the warehouse is a very hard problem. Robots would have to be prepared for every possible item, orientation and configuration while doing the packing. Plus, warehouses get completely new products all the time, which would require training updates. (Or just strong AI).

The coordinated movement of square pods in a grid system is super cool and complicated looking, but it's much easier than all the object recognition and manipulation tasks we take for granted.