Robotics startups are finally shipping useful warehouse arms
After a decade of demos, real pallets are moving.
Observers describe a mood of cautious optimism, the kind that travels in private conversations long before it appears in any press release.
Whatever happens next, the baseline has moved. The old assumptions no longer describe the room they were built to describe.
The institutional response has been measured, which in this context is a polite way of saying slow.
Critics raise familiar objections, and some of them land. The honest answer is that the tradeoffs are real and worth naming.
The numbers tell part of the story. The rest lives in the texture of how people are actually behaving when no one is watching.
Still, the conversation has changed. The questions in the room are different from the questions in the room six months ago.
