Meet Me: Fulfillment Robots That Revolutionize Warehouse Order Picking in 2025

As fulfillment robots become essential to modern warehouse operations, Onward Robotics is helping supply chain leaders overcome labor shortages and increase order accuracy with Meet Me automation.

Updated: June 11, 2025

When investing resources and time into selecting and implementing an order fulfillment automation solution, it’s important to understand and evaluate which autonomous mobile robot (AMR) system approach aligns to your organization’s KPIs, supports your workforce, and enables your operations to meet service level agreements (SLAs) and keep up with demand.

In fulfillment warehouses, talent is scarce and resources are tight, yet customer expectations remain high. As supply chain leaders look to do more with less, automating traditionally manual processes has shifted. What was once considered a competitive advantage has now become a survival imperative. The order-picking process is widely reported as one of the most costly and resource-heavy processes within a fulfillment warehouse. 

Current mobile robotic solutions on the market offer various methods to coordinate and connect human and robotic workforces for order picking. However, gaps remain in implementing technology that reduces warehouse manager and picker effort as well as click-to-customer turnaround time. The stakes have never been higher. With the U.S. warehousing industry facing a shortage of over 35,000 workers and automated warehouses achieving 99% inventory accuracy while reducing labor costs by 3% annually, the question isn’t whether to automate—it’s how to automate intelligently.

The New Reality: Automation as Essential Infrastructure

Today’s fulfillment environment is defined by extremes. Only 5% of warehouses are fully or nearly fully automated, while 80% still operate with minimal automation. This massive gap represents both the challenge and the opportunity facing warehouse operators today.

The pandemic fundamentally rewired consumer expectations. Same-day delivery is no longer a luxury—it’s the baseline. Meanwhile, automated picking systems are improving order fulfillment speeds by up to 300%, creating a performance chasm between automated and manual operations that’s becoming impossible to bridge through labor alone.

Labor Challenges Driving the Need for Fulfillment Robots

The numbers tell a stark story. Major industry players, including Amazon, have reported turnover rates exceeding 150%, while warehouse operators are offering up to 5% wage increases just to attract workers. This isn’t a temporary adjustment—it’s the new cost of doing business in a labor-constrained world.

Warehouse jobs boomed with e-commerce growth during the pandemic, but now leaders are shifting investment to automate processes to reduce costs and increase productivity. With temporary or flexible workers in the warehouse on the rise and layoffs affecting full-time workers across the industry, relying solely on manual labor to keep up in an on-demand market is no longer a sustainable or dependable strategy.

Why Fulfillment Robots Are Key to Solving Order Picking Bottlenecks

As supply chain leaders search for opportunities to increase margins and grow revenue, identifying operational processes to automate that boost productivity while reducing costs will have the most impact. What activities are most critical in meeting customer expectations and budget? In Peerless Research Group’s Automation Study, picking efficiency (lines picked per hour) was reported as the top area for improvement in warehouse and distribution center operations over the next two years. In end-to-end fulfillment processes, accuracy and speed are key to successfully meeting SLAs.

Introducing robotics can optimize the picking process, significantly reducing worker travel and errors while providing the agility to adapt when swings in demand occur.

Despite advances in warehouse technology, order picking continues to account for 50-55% of total operational costs. It’s the most labor-intensive, error-prone, and physically demanding process in the fulfillment chain. More importantly, it’s where customer satisfaction is won or lost. The challenge isn’t just about speed—it’s about consistency.

Manual picking operations suffer from:

• Variable performance based on worker experience and fatigue
• Inconsistent accuracy rates that damage customer trust
• Physical strain leading to injury and turnover
• Inflexibility when demand patterns shift

As robotic technology continues to evolve, it remains a partially manual process to fulfill customer orders. Therefore, when automating order picking, it is not simply automating manual tasks and determining the proper picking method, but orchestrating and optimizing how human workers and AMRs work together. How workflows are assigned, orchestrated, and communicated across resources is critical to increasing uptime and pick rates. This is where various AMR system vendors used in warehouses and distribution centers (DCs) begin to differ.

How Fulfillment Robots Work with Humans in the Warehouse

The warehouse automation market has matured beyond simple mechanization. Today’s challenge is orchestrating seamless collaboration between human intelligence and robotic precision. However, many current solutions still treat this partnership as an afterthought rather than a core design principle.

With humans and robots working together, task assignment, labor balancing, and communication are key to executing efficient and seamless workflows. Legacy person-to-goods AMR warehouse systems have traditionally offered two worker/robot workflow orchestration models: “follow me” and “find me.” 

The Power of Independent Operation

Orchestration of resources optimizes workflows, however, successful implementation, adoption, and ongoing usage of robotic automation also relies on optimal human and robot interaction. Workers filling these roles continue to change, with 69% of businesses leveraging temporary and flexible workers year-round in their operations–up from 57% in 2021. Considering increased turnover and temporary labor, training needs to be simple, repeatable, and quick. The repetitive work of order picking should be easy and engaging in order to increase employee satisfaction, minimize physical strain, and boost productivity.

In the Meet Me model, the Pyxis technology platform orchestrates humans and robots as separate, optimized workflows that converge at the point of need. Pickers receive comprehensive task information through the intuitive Pyxis Point mobile app, enabling them to move independently to predetermined pick locations where their robotic counterparts await.

Faster Cycle Times with Visual Task Allocation

Legacy person-to-goods AMR system offerings rely on a combination of a tablet user interface mounted to the robot and lights on the robot to direct the worker to the proper location, SKU, and quantity for picking. In both “find me” and “follow me” models, pickers need to properly locate their robot counterpart. Once picking, they must determine the proper tote, shelf, and associated quantity for each line item utilizing the user interface and select robot lighting.

With Meet Me automation, workers meet their robot at the location specified on their mobile device. They are guided through the pick visually using the Pyxis Point™ user interface. Put-to-light shelving on Lumabot® ensures accurate and simple order picking each time. Workers are informed and enabled, resulting in faster cycle times.

More Capacity, Improved Ergonomics

With over 5% of warehouse workers impacted by work-related injuries and over 2% of cases resulting in days away from work, improving ergonomics with robotic automation can keep pickers happier and more productive.

With the Pyxis Point mobile application, workers are armed with the information they need to pick safely, quickly, and accurately.

Powered Productivity: Built for Continuous Operation

Robots don’t take breaks, but just like their human team members, they need energy to perform. Continuous fulfillment relies on robots being fully charged to keep moving product throughout the warehouse. Both “find me” and “follow me” AMR systems utilize power recharging stations. These stations take robots off the floor to power up. Lumabot AMRs feature advanced lithium-ion batteries that power up to two full shifts without charging. More importantly, the hot-swap capability allows battery replacement during operations, ensuring robots never leave active fulfillment areas for power management.

The Future of Fulfillment is Here

As we move deeper into 2025, the gap between automated and manual fulfillment operations will only widen. Global retail eCommerce sales are expected to reach $7.4 trillion, while labor availability continues to constrain growth potential. Meet Me represents more than an incremental improvement—it’s a fundamental reimagining of how humans and robots can work together to create fulfillment operations that are more productive, more humane, and more adaptable to future challenges.

The question facing fulfillment leaders today isn’t whether automation is necessary—it’s whether they’ll choose solutions that merely replace human labor or systems that amplify human capability. Meet Me empowers warehouse teams to achieve both productivity goals and workforce satisfaction, creating sustainable competitive advantages that grow stronger over time.

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