“Moving pallets around, moving forklifts around, moving boxes around in fulfillment centers—that’s an area where we’ve seen just massive robotic explosion,” says Matthew Johnson-Roberson, director of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Amazon operates its own in-house robotics company to push the tech forward. And a growing cadre of startups, such as Berkshire Grey, Covariant, Dexterity, and Plus One Robotics, are offering automation services to the rest of the industry…

Goods have a long way to travel to and from warehouses, and the work of truckers is grueling. One of the job’s downsides is the monotony of highway driving—but such dull duties are, again, the sweet spot for automation. Several well-funded companies, including Aurora, Plus, TuSimple, and Google sister company Waymo, are testing automated driving systems.

Some companies have proposed first automating the highway part—which comprises over 90% of long-haul trucking—and using human drivers to handle the trickier navigation around cities.