Yorkshire Post reporter Chris Burn was given a tour of Amazon’s latest huge facility in the region - a £500m fulfilment centre on the outskirts of Leeds fuelled by “harmony” between robots and workers.
On the three robotics floors, staff place products in four-sided towers called pods - on the other side of fences, small robots are whizzing about to drop off pods to employees or whizz off full ones for storage.
The flat machines, which look similar to the automated vacuum cleaners that are increasingly popular in many households, are called Hercules robots and scan QR codes on the floor to help reach the right locations and avoid collisions along the way.
Watching them dart along is an unexpectedly hypnotic experience.
Robots are not a new innovation for Amazon - the company acquired a robotics firm called Kiva back in 2012 and has since introduced several different types of robots across its operations.
The company itself has admitted there was some concern about what the changes would mean for jobs but says that has not been borne out by reality.
