> Why don't they just embed an RFID chip in every box, give the robot sensors to triangulate the position of the RFID code matching the desired product, and gra

> Why don't they just embed an RFID chip in every box, give the robot sensors to triangulate the position of the RFID code matching the desired product, and grab that? Whenever you start a sentence with "why don't they just", remember that there are literally hundreds of people whose entire job it is to solve these problems, and there's probably very good reasons. In this case, the answer is "noise". A fellow I knew worked on a project at Amazon fulfillment to use RFID enabled shipping labels so that ideally they could load the truck and know which packages were on it. It was a total failure. If the sensors are high enough to read every package, then you'll read half the packages 20 feet away as well. If it's low enough to only detect the ones you want, it won't detect all of them. "Triangulate the position of the RFID code" is just not really a thing. Maybe in the future, but today RFID is just not that reliable. Also the labor cost to add an RFID tag to every item is prohibitively high.