It’s hard to find good help these days—especially in the warehouse, where peak season demands and the ups and downs of tariffs have made it difficult for facilities to maintain the necessary staffing levels. Warehouse automation is helping many companies narrow that gap by handing over repetitive and mundane tasks to robots. Nowhere is that more welcome than on the loading dock, home to one of the warehouse’s toughest and most physically demanding jobs: unloading trailers. Robots are helping to alleviate that strain by replacing hard-to-find—and increasingly expensive—warehouse labor with automated solutions that speed those processes and free up staff for other tasks.
Although still in the early phases of adoption, robotic truck unloading is advancing rapidly, as evidenced by vendor expansion and a growing number of equipment installations nationwide. Earlier this year, for example, Cambridge, Massachusetts-based robotics developer Pickle Robot said it planned to hire 50 additional engineers in response to demand for its robotic truck unloading system, which is already at work in warehouses across the country. Austin, Texas-based Contoro Robotics is experiencing similar demand: Its trailer unloading solution is in use at customer locations in California, Texas, Illinois, and New Jersey, with additional sites in California and Illinois—and its first site in Indiana—set to launch in early 2026, according to John Cook, the company’s director of business development.
Pickle and Contoro are among a growing number of companies that offer solutions for unloading containers of floor-loaded boxes faster than a human can—and without the risk of injury or discomfort that is all too common on loading docks, which can be dirty, noisy, and subject to extreme temperatures. As more warehouses seek to ease those challenges and keep labor costs under control, vendors are responding with new capabilities designed to sustain the momentum for automating this labor-intensive warehouse task.
EASING THE CRUNCH, MANAGING COSTS
Workforce marketplace Instawork summed up today’s warehouse labor challenges in its “2025 State of Warehouse Labor” report, pointing to a fragile warehouse labor market that has seen only modest improvements over the past year.
“Compared to last year when 13% of respondents said [warehouse] staffing was harder, … 10% of this year’s respondents said staffing was more difficult in 2025. [And] 38% reported it was easier in 2024, compared to 50% [who] reported it was easier in 2025,” the researchers wrote in the report, adding that despite the gains, most warehouse operators are still struggling to maintain a full team—especially as peak season demand spikes and tariffs impact inventory flow. “While [the survey shows] a modest improvement from 2024, it underscores how fragile the labor market still is for many facilities. Staffing strategies must now account for sudden shifts in demand driven by global economic factors.”
Those shifts are also driving up labor costs. Wages for entry-level warehouse work typically range from $15 to $22 per hour, according to the survey, with most respondents saying they expect worker pay to rise between 1% and 5% this year—although many indicated they have reached a wage ceiling they feel they can’t exceed without compromising “already thin” operating margins. This puts warehouses at “a crossroads,” according to the report, whose authors note that competitive compensation remains key to attracting and retaining top talent—especially as inflation continues to drive up the cost of everyday goods.
Cook argues that robotic truck unloading can alleviate those cost pressures by automating the process and freeing up workers for other warehouse tasks.
“We believe that everything that comes in on a floor-loaded trailer has some cost embedded in it for a human to unload,” Cook explains. “Your glasses, Airpods, earrings—all of that was probably delivered … in a floor-loaded trailer, and a portion of the price [of those products] is for [humans] to do this work.”
Cook asks: Why not give that job to a robot and assign the human labor to more value-added tasks—especially as labor rates rise?
“Leave that [task] to the robots and maybe my shirt will be 12 cents cheaper as a result,” he says. “Truly, that’s the way we’ve thought about it at Contoro. We’re trying to provide an automated value for our warehousing customers to really offset some of the costs we all have to eat. We’re passionate about trying to reduce the inflationary costs we’re all absorbing.”
Cook says Contoro’s robots-as-a-service (RaaS) model helps alleviate those cost concerns as well. The company charges a per-trailer rate for unloading, allowing companies to avoid a large upfront capital expenditure for the robots and making it easier for many to afford the technology. Demand has been strongest from third-party logistics service providers (3PLs) and large consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies, but Cook says smaller firms can benefit from the technology as well. In general, the service makes financial sense for companies that unload at least one trailer per day, he says.
The RaaS model has also helped potential customers overcome a tariff-related hesitation to adopt new technologies, Cook adds.
“Earlier this year, companies were pausing their focus toward automation until more information was available about the tariffs,” he says, noting that the pressure eased toward the end of the second quarter. “With our pay-by-the-trailer model, we were really positioned well to encourage our customers to adopt us during that time. And for those that did, they are benefiting now as volumes are back up.”
EXPANDING CAPABILITIES
Customers also stand to benefit from the steady advances robotics vendors are making in their truck unloading solutions. That includes improving the robots’ sensing and grasping capabilities and teaching them to better understand motion, behavior, and real-world consequences.
As part of its expansion efforts, Pickle Robot announced in June that it is collaborating with experts at Harvard and Columbia Universities as well as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to advance the company’s “physical AI” capabilities—an area of artificial intelligence that focuses on the development of autonomous systems such as cameras, robots, and self-driving cars that can perceive, understand, and perform complex actions in the physical world. The partnerships will help Pickle deepen its “ability to deliver intelligent, human-scale automation that can adapt to the real-world complexity our customers face every day,” Pickle’s founder and CEO, AJ Meyer, said at the time.
At Contoro, engineers are focused on developing robots that can handle a wider range of box sizes and weights as well as new solutions that can integrate and assist with other warehouses processes.
Contoro’s robots can handle boxes as small as eight inches in length, height, and width and as large as 30 inches in length, height, and width. The weight range is up to 65 pounds, and Contoro is focused on increasing that—a feat Cook says is possible with the company’s dual-grasp end effector, which allows the robot to firmly grasp a box from the front and one of its sides.
The company is also developing a palletizing solution that it says will lead to the next step in automating the unloading process. As the unloader is moving boxes from the trailer onto a conveyor, a second robot will pick up the boxes from the conveyor and place them on pallets to prepare them for storage in the warehouse. Cook says he expects that solution to be available in mid-2026.
It’s part of a broader effort to ease the physical burdens associated with warehouse work and make robotic truck unloading an extension of the automated warehouse.
“We don’t anticipate that humans are going to do this job much beyond 2035,” Cook says, emphasizing the rising demand for robotic truck unloading systems. “The size of the prize is so big, the industry needs everyone jumping in to provide this service.”
