Hybrid warehouses run on three different traffic systems. Here’s how to make them speak one language.
A forklift driver and an AMR walk into a warehouse
That’s not the start of a joke. That’s Tuesday morning at most modern distribution centres. Forklifts pulling pallets from racks. AMRs ferrying totes between zones. Pedestrians moving between them. Three different traffic systems, each with their own logic, their own sensors, their own definition of “safe distance.”
What they don’t have? A shared language.
And that’s the problem.
The hybrid warehouse promise, and the safety gap nobody talks about
Robotics vendors sold the dream: drop in an AMR fleet, watch productivity climb. Most warehouses now run somewhere between 5 and 50 mobile robots alongside their existing forklift fleet. The productivity gains are real.
The safety gap is too.
Here’s what’s happening on the floor:
- AMRs see forklifts as obstacles: they slow down, reroute, freeze. Productivity dies.
- Forklift drivers don’t trust AMRs: they brake hard, take wider lines, lose seconds on every pass.
- Pedestrians get caught in the middle: three sets of safety rules, three different beep tones, zero clarity.
- Each vendor has their own safety system: a Toyota forklift, a Lowpad AMR and an in-house pallet jack literally cannot talk to each other.
The result: a warehouse that is technically automated, but operationally chaotic. Near-misses go up. Throughput goes down. Both KPIs suffer at the same time.
This is the part the brochures skip.
Why bolt-on safety doesn’t work in a hybrid fleet
Most warehouses try to fix this with the tools they already know:
- Add proximity sensors to the forklifts.
- Trust the AMR’s onboard LIDAR to handle the rest.
- Tag the pedestrians with wearables.
- Train operators to “just be careful.”
Each of those is a point solution. None of them creates a shared awareness layer. The forklift doesn’t know what the AMR is about to do. The AMR doesn’t know the forklift is reversing. And the pedestrian wearing the tag has already taken it off because it’s annoying.
You don’t have a hybrid safety system. You have four separate ones, hoping they don’t collide.
Enter RoboTrack™: one nervous system for the hybrid warehouse
RoboTrack™ is Essensium’s safety integration layer for AGVs and AMRs. It plugs into the same Essensium Positioning System (EPS) that powers SafeTrack™ on manned forklifts, meaning your robots and your forklifts finally see each other in the same coordinate system, in real time.
What makes it different:
- Tagless and anchorless. No infrastructure changes. No tags on pedestrians, pallets, or robots. Retrofit-ready in weeks, not months.
- Vendor-agnostic. RoboTrack™ works with any AMR or AGV platform. We’ve already integrated with Lowpad, and we’re rolling out integrations with multiple other partners as we speak.
- One shared safety logic. Forklifts, robots and people are all governed by the same rules, priority lanes, slow zones, V2V and V2P avoidance, automatic slowdowns. No translation layer between vendors.
- Live data into the Customer Cockpit. Every AMR movement, every near-miss, every congestion point feeds the same dashboard your HSE team already uses for SafeTrack™ data.
In short: instead of running two safety systems in parallel, you run one, across your entire fleet.
What this looks like in practice
Picture a 25,000 m² distribution centre. Forty manned forklifts. Fifteen AMRs. Two shifts.
Without a shared safety layer, the AMRs are programmed to stop or reroute every time a forklift enters their zone. That’s hundreds of micro-pauses a day. Each one a few seconds. Add it up: hours of lost throughput per shift, just from robots being cautious about humans they can’t predict.
With RoboTrack™ active, the AMR doesn’t need to assume the worst. It knows exactly where the forklift is, where it’s heading, and what it’s about to do. The forklift gets the same information back. The AMR keeps moving when it’s safe to. The forklift slows down only when it actually needs to. And the operator gets a clear visual cue, the same Lighttower feedback they already trust from SafeTrack™.
Less waiting. Fewer near-misses. Same fleet, more output.
That’s what “human + machine = harmony” actually looks like.
Why this matters for ROI
Most warehouse leaders evaluate AMR investments on a single axis: throughput. The math usually looks good in a vacuum.
The math looks different on a real warehouse floor, once you factor in the productivity tax of running two safety systems side by side. Empty AMR runs. Forklift drivers braking unnecessarily. Pedestrian incidents that pause an entire zone for ten minutes.
Komatsu hit ROI in under 12 months on their Essensium deployment by treating safety as a productivity lever, not a compliance line item. The same logic applies to RoboTrack™. Every avoided AMR pause is a pallet moved on time. Every avoided near-miss is a shift that doesn’t get audited. Safety is the wedge. Productivity is the payoff.
The bottom line
Hybrid warehouses aren’t coming. They’re here. And the operations leaders who figure out how to make forklifts, robots and people share one safety language will run circles around the ones still juggling four separate systems.
RoboTrack™ is how we do it. Tagless. Vendor-agnostic. Retrofit-ready. Already proven with Lowpad, expanding fast with new partners.
If you’re rolling out AMRs in 2026, or you’ve already rolled them out and the productivity numbers aren’t matching the brochure, let’s talk.