If you work in any kind of storage facility or warehouse, there’s a better chance every day that you’re going to be working alongside robots. Magazino’s TORU is a good example of the latest generation: navigating by sight, safe around humans, and simple to put to work.

The TORU Cube (other Platonic solids to come, no doubt) is meant to operate in ordinary, human-scale environments with ordinary shelves and boxes. It can grab and store away up to 8 shoebox-size packages in one run, delivering them to a chosen location or replacing them in the stacks as needed.

Laser rangers let it identify and roll around humans and unexpected obstacles, and there are no big, free arms to whack them with. No special beacons or reflectors are needed to tell the bot where it is, either; it checks its perceived environment against a stored map and deduces its position from that.

Here it is doing its thing:

A set of three TORUs are being delivered to the Fiege Mega Center, a major warehouse in Erfurt; the company’s CEO, Jens Fiege, sounds appropriately thrilled in the press release:

The robots of Magazino are an exciting project to digitise our warehouses even more. I believe, with our practical expertise, we are contributing to the development of applying robotics within intralogistics.

The best way to move the industry forward is almost certainly to embrace the uncertain future and see whether it hugs you back. That can actually be pretty dangerous with robots, but the armless TORU is probably a safe bet.