Guide
Autonomous forklifts at work: what customers actually confirm
Autonomous forklifts are doing real work in warehouses, but the fleets that customers confirm are small. The largest count a customer has put its own name to is Walmart's 19 Fox Robotics FoxBots across four distribution centers, announced in April 2024 as a rollout Walmart would keep evaluating. Vendor totals point the same way: Fox's website now lists 120 robots at 55 production sites, about two per site.
Only one public case gives a per-truck rate together with fleet size, hours and an autonomy share, with a named customer behind it. Third Wave Automation says four of its reach trucks at Armada Supply Chain Solutions in Romeoville, Illinois, averaged 10.7 moves per truck per hour and ran fully autonomously 68% of the time. That case also shows how much human help the work still needs. One remote operator handled four trucks, while vendors advertise six, ten or more.
The listed forklift makers do not fill the gap. KION, Jungheinrich and Toyota Industries report automation inside wider segments and publish no count of autonomous trucks. The clearest public accounts from a forklift-automation specialist, BALYO's, showed a loss-making business that SoftBank took private in April 2026.
Analysis based on customer releases and annual reports (Walmart, Coca-Cola Bottlers Japan, Metro Supply Chain, Ryder), SEC filings and an earnings-call transcript (Symbotic, Walmart), regulator notices (France's AMF), company reports (BALYO, KION, Jungheinrich, Toyota Industries), vendor case pages and trade press, all retrieved November 10, 2026. AI assistance was used in research and drafting, and the piece was checked by a separate AI fact-check and AI editorial review. Servospace did not visit any site, interview the companies named, or see operating data. Calculations are Servospace arithmetic on published figures and are labeled as such.
In this analysis
- The short answer
- What kind of evidence each number is
- Customer by customer
- Walmart and Fox: 19 robots, 55 sites and mostly pilots
- Armada: the one public per-truck rate
- One operator, how many trucks?
- What the vendor and OEM reports count
- Counterevidence and limits
- What a buyer or investor should ask for
The short answer
- Confirmed by customers, with a count: Walmart, 19 FoxBots across four high-tech distribution centers (in Florida, Texas, New York and Alabama, per a Walmart spokesperson quoted by Grocery Dive), after a 16-month proof of concept at its Brooksville, Florida, center (April 2024). That is the only customer-published robot count in this review.
- Confirmed by customers, without a count: Coca-Cola Bottlers Japan says a Toyota Industries autonomous four-fork forklift has loaded and unloaded trucks in full-scale operation at its Hakushu Plant Warehouse since May 9, 2025. Metro Supply Chain says it runs "a fleet of Trey robots" from Gideon for trailer work and lists "24 single-stacked pallets loaded and unloaded per hour," without saying how many robots or whether that rate is per robot. Ryder's 2025 annual report claims "200% growth in autonomous mobile forklifts" since 2021, from a base it does not give.
- Named customer, vendor's page: Armada's four Third Wave reach trucks, with the only per-truck rate and autonomy share in the public record.
- Vendor counts with no customer behind them: Fox's 120 robots at 55 sites, BALYO's "more than 1,500 robots" deployed in more than 25 countries, and a Vecna case page describing 26 robots at an unnamed Texas candy maker.
- Not published by anyone: an industry-wide count of autonomous forklifts in daily use, or a customer's own figures for hours run per robot and how often a person steps in.
What kind of evidence each number is
Forklift automation claims arrive through very different channels, and the label matters more than the number.
| Evidence type | Example here | Establishes | Does not establish |
|---|---|---|---|
| Customer's own release or report | Walmart's 19 robots; Coca-Cola Bottlers Japan's full-scale start; Ryder's growth percentage | That the customer stands behind the statement | Rate, uptime, human help, whether it is still running today |
| Vendor page quoting named customer staff | Armada's 10.7 moves per truck-hour | Detailed figures a named customer allowed to be published | An independent measurement; definitions the page leaves out |
| Vendor page, unnamed customer | Vecna's 26-robot candy maker | That Vecna makes the claim | Who the customer is, or any check of the figures |
| Vendor counter or fact sheet | Fox's 120 robots, 55 sites | The vendor's own tally at some date | Customers versus sites, pilots versus paid fleets, as-of date |
| Acquirer's earnings-call remark | Symbotic's "mostly what they're doing is pilots" | How the new owner describes the business | A count of paid fleets |
| Listed OEM segment reporting | Jungheinrich's automation segment revenue | Money in a segment that includes far more than forklifts | Number of autonomous trucks |
Customer by customer
| Customer | Vendor | Robots, per source | Sites | Task | Status in the customer's or vendor's words |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Walmart | Fox Robotics (acquired by Symbotic) | 19 (Walmart); "19 additional" (Fox) | 4 distribution centers | Unloading pallets from trailers and taking them to automated storage | Rollout after a 16-month proof of concept, "with the potential for more as we evaluate" (April 2024) |
| Armada Supply Chain Solutions | Third Wave Automation | 4 reach trucks | 1 (Romeoville, Ill.) | Putaway into racking, including push-back racks | Pilot from November 2024 to January 2026, then converted to a commercial deployment (Third Wave) |
| Coca-Cola Bottlers Japan | Toyota Industries | Not stated | 1 (Hakushu Plant Warehouse, Yamanashi) | Truck loading and unloading, two pallets at once | Full-scale operation since May 9, 2025; plans to expand to day-and-night operations |
| Metro Supply Chain | Gideon | "A fleet," count not stated | Not stated | Trailer loading and unloading | In use; "24 single-stacked pallets loaded and unloaded per hour," basis not stated (March 2026 customer page) |
| Holman Logistics | Third Wave Automation | Not stated | 1 (multi-client warehouse, Spanaway, Wash.) | Inbound moves, racking, replenishment | "Plan to implement" (May 2024); no later count found |
| Unnamed Texas candy maker | Vecna Robotics | 26 | Not stated | Moving double-stacked pallets from inbound to in-aisle staging | "Initial commitment" (Vecna case page) |
| Ryder | Not named | Not stated ("200% growth" since 2021) | Not stated | Not stated | Growth claim in annual report |
Sources: Walmart and Fox releases; Third Wave's Armada case study; Coca-Cola Bottlers Japan release and Toyota Industries Report 2025 (two-pallet handling); Metro Supply Chain; Holman release; Vecna case page; Ryder 2025 annual report.
Two patterns stand out. First, most of the work is at the edges of the building: trailers, docks and putaway, where pallets move between fixed points. Second, the customers that publish the most detail (Walmart, Coca-Cola Bottlers Japan) describe one task at a few sites. None of them describes autonomous forklifts replacing a building's forklift fleet.
Walmart and Fox: 19 robots, 55 sites and mostly pilots
Walmart's April 11, 2024 post, written by Maurice Gray, general manager of its Brooksville distribution center, is the strongest customer statement in this review. It names the vendor, the count (19), the number of buildings (four) and the job: FoxBots unload pallets from trailers and "ferry them to be inducted into the automated storage and retrieval system." Walmart also took a minority stake in Fox. A Walmart spokesperson told Supply Chain Dive the four sites would be used to "test how using the autonomous forklift to unload trailers will improve the associate experience and business operations," as Grocery Dive reported.
The post's one performance claim has no denominator. It says an associate "can now direct a FoxBot autonomous forklift to three times the same output," without saying output of what, over what period, or compared with which manual process. Fox's own release says "19 additional" robots, which suggests the proof-of-concept units sit on top of the 19. Walmart's wording does not say that.
Walmart has not published an update with a count. Its annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended January 31, 2026 does not mention forklifts or Fox. That is normal for a company of Walmart's size, but it means the 19 is an April 2024 number.
Fox's own counts have moved over time:
| Source | Date | Robots | Sites or customers | Pallets |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fox fact sheet | Jan. 2024 entry | Not given | Not given | 2.5 million lifetime pallet pulls |
| Fox release on Walmart | April 15, 2024 | Not given | Not given | More than 3 million |
| Fox fact sheet | Oct. 2024 entry | Not given | Not given | 5 million |
| Fox fact sheet | dated March 10, 2025 | "100+" installed | 54 customer sites | Not given |
| Symbotic CEO Rick Cohen, earnings call | Feb. 4, 2026 | Not given | 25 customers | Not given |
| Fox homepage counters | Undated, retrieved Nov. 10, 2026 | 120 "ATLs in fleet" | 55 "production sites" | 7 million pallets picked |
Sources: Fox fact sheet; Fox homepage; Symbotic call transcript.
Servospace arithmetic: 120 robots across 55 sites is about 2.2 per site. Walmart's 19 across four centers is about 4.75 per center. If all 19 are still running, which nobody has said, Walmart alone would account for about one in six of the robots Fox lists.
The site and customer counts are different units, so they do not contradict each other. Fifty-five sites and 25 customers can both be true if some customers have several sites, as Walmart does. The more important difference is the label. When Symbotic closed its purchase of Fox, an analyst on the February 4, 2026 call asked whether Fox's customers were running pilots. Cohen answered: "Mostly what they're doing is pilots. They are selling to our large customer." He added that "our large customer has thousands of fork trucks," that "we have some very big customers who have been experimenting with Fox," and that "it's very early stage." Asked about revenue, he said: "Can't really say what the revenue implications are." The pilots quote appears in the same words in the published transcript and in The Robot Report's account of the call.
Symbotic has not broken Fox out in its filings. Its quarterly report for the period ended June 2026 contains no mention of Fox, and an EDGAR full-text search for "Fox Robotics" on November 10, 2026 returned only Fox's own 2022 fundraising notice. Walmart's new roughly $6 billion automation agreement with Symbotic, filed October 29, 2026, does not mention forklifts either. For more on what that relationship does and does not show, see our Symbotic and Walmart evidence guide.
Armada: the one public per-truck rate
Third Wave Automation's Armada case study is the most detailed account in the public record, and two named Armada executives are quoted on it. It describes four Third Wave reach trucks at Armada's Romeoville foodservice distribution center, integrated with Armada's Blue Yonder warehouse management system, putting pallets away into racking that includes push-back racks and loads up to 103 inches tall.
The page reports, for the pilot from November 2024 to January 2026:
| Metric | Reported value |
|---|---|
| Pallets moved | 25,863 |
| Production hours | 3,849 |
| Average in-spec moves per truck per hour | 10.7 (target was 8) |
| Time in full autonomy | 68% |
| Truck availability | 90.4% |
| Inventory accuracy | 99.94% |
| Forklift-to-operator ratio | 4:1 |
| Safety incidents | Zero |
| Estimated savings | About $18,000 a month (Armada estimate) |
Kris Jensen, Armada's vice president of warehouse operations, is quoted as saying the site ran "almost 70% autonomously in a legacy building" and that Armada expects "90%+" in a new building. The page says Armada's own operators took over the fleet in December 2024 and that the site became a commercial deployment in January 2026.
This case passes more of the denominator test than any other here: robot count, site, task, window and an autonomy share. Two fields are still unclear. Servospace arithmetic: 25,863 pallets over 3,849 production hours is about 6.7 pallets per production hour. That is not the same figure as the 10.7 in-spec moves per truck per hour on the same page. The numerators differ (pallets moved vs in-spec moves), and the page does not define production hours or say whether they are truck-hours. A New Warehouse article from October 2026 calls the 25,863 "pallet moves." A buyer would need those definitions before comparing the rate with anything else.
The 68% figure is the other half of the story. For about a third of the time the trucks were not in full autonomy, and the page says push-back racking and tall loads "require operator assistance on individual moves." Third Wave builds for that: a remote operator takes over the hard moves. This is a defensible design, but the labor case depends on how often that happens at your site, not at Armada's.
One operator, how many trucks?
Every autonomous forklift pitch includes a ratio of trucks to people. The ratios in the record come from four different kinds of source:
| Claim | Ratio | Source and type |
|---|---|---|
| Armada, measured over the pilot | 4 trucks to 1 operator | Third Wave case page with Armada executives quoted |
| Fox homepage | "6+" FoxBots per operator | Vendor marketing |
| Third Wave and Raymond | "Up to ten" forklifts per operator "in typical operations" | Joint release, June 16, 2026 |
| Crown Equipment's Jim Gaskell | "Five AGV tenders can manage a 50-truck fleet" | Material Handling 24/7, Aug. 6, 2026 |
The only measured figure, Armada's, is the lowest. That does not make the others wrong. Ratios should rise in simpler buildings and with larger fleets, and Armada's site was chosen because it was hard. But a ratio quoted without a site, a task and an exception rate is a target, not a result. Vecna's chief commercial officer, Cody Upp, put the underlying point plainly in the same Material Handling 24/7 piece: "There's this human-in-the-loop element that is just always going to be there, in my opinion."
The Vecna candy case shows why the inputs behind a headline matter. The page reports 1,500 pallets a day, $0.80 per pallet moved and $8.20 per hour per robot across 26 robots. Servospace arithmetic: 1,500 times $0.80 is $1,200 a day; 26 robots at $8.20 an hour is $213.20 for each hour the whole fleet runs. If both figures were measured the same way, the robots would average about 5.6 hours of work a day each, or about 58 pallets per robot per day. The page does not give hours run, so the two cost figures cannot be reconciled from what is published, and the customer is not named.
What the vendor and OEM reports count
The companies with audited reports are the ones that could supply an industry denominator. None does for autonomous forklifts.
- BALYO (driverless forklift kits on standard trucks): its 2025 results release says it has "deployed more than 1,500 robots in more than 25 countries," a cumulative figure that does not say how many are running now. Revenue was €31.4 million in 2025, about 69% of it from the United States, with an operating loss of €12.15 million and €1.3 million of cash at year-end (unaudited). The release says its professional services and maintenance businesses were "currently loss-making," and that management expects to pass break-even "from 2028 onward." SoftBank, which held more than 91%, lent it up to €12 million at 15% a year, and France's market regulator set the squeeze-out of the remaining shareholders for April 27, 2026, at €0.60 a share. With its shares no longer listed, the 2025 release may be the last full set of BALYO results made public.
- KION (Linde, STILL, Dematic): its 2025 annual report says the industrial trucks segment offers AMRs and AGVs as stand-alone automation, and cites growing demand for automated trucks. We found no count of automated trucks in it. KION also agreed in 2024 to build FoxBots in Summerville, South Carolina, according to Fox's fact sheet.
- Jungheinrich: its new automation and warehouse equipment segment had €751 million of revenue in the first nine months of 2026, up 16.6%, and reported EBIT of €0.8 million (that figure includes a €0.9 million release of provisions; adjusted EBIT was €-0.1 million), according to its nine-month release. Its 2025 annual report defines that segment as integrated automation and warehousing systems, mobile robots, warehouse equipment and software. The revenue cannot be read as autonomous forklifts.
- Toyota Industries (Toyota L&F, Raymond, Vanderlande, Bastian): its 2025 integrated report features the Coca-Cola Bottlers Japan truck-loading forklift as a case study and gives no count of automated forklifts. Raymond is now adding Third Wave's software to its own automated trucks.
Vendor counts from private companies stay unverified. That includes the claims about orders in our Aformic funding story. The same gap shows up in other warehouse categories: AutoStore reports a system count in its quarterly reports, while most robot piece-picking figures come from vendor case pages.
Counterevidence and limits
- The work is real. Walmart, Coca-Cola Bottlers Japan and Metro Supply Chain describe autonomous forklifts doing production work under their own names, and Armada let its executives be quoted on detailed figures. This analysis questions the scale, not the existence.
- Counts may have grown. Walmart's 19 is from April 2024, and Fox's listed fleet went from "100+" in its March 2025 fact sheet to 120 on its homepage in November 2026. Walmart may run more FoxBots now. Neither company has said.
- "Pilots" was a reply, not a disclosure. Cohen was agreeing with an analyst's framing on a call. It is the new owner's description, not a count of which fleets are paid.
- Fox's homepage is undated. Its 7 million pallets could be current or stale. If current, Servospace arithmetic says the homepage counter is about 2 million above the October 2024 fact-sheet lifetime pallet-pull mark, against a 2.5 million rise in the nine months before that mark. The labels are not identical, and the reading depends on the counter being current, which we cannot verify.
- Absence is not proof. Walmart and Symbotic leaving Fox out of their filings may just mean the business is small relative to theirs.
- The vendor list is incomplete. Seegrid, OTTO (Rockwell), Vecna, Gideon, Multiway and many Chinese makers report fleets and miles in their own terms. We included cases where a customer is named or a figure can be checked against another, and left out unchecked vendor totals.
- Safety record not assessed. The vendors cited report zero incidents in specific cases. We could not retrieve OSHA's accident database with our tools and make no claim about the category's safety record.
- No ROI estimate. Armada's $18,000 a month and Vecna's "less than 7 months to positive ROI" are company estimates, and nothing here turns them into a payback figure for anyone else.
What a buyer or investor should ask for
An autonomous forklift claim becomes evidence when it carries its denominator. These fields were missing from at least one figure above:
| Missing field | Ask for |
|---|---|
| Robot count and as-of date | Trucks running in production this month, by site, separate from pilots and units on order |
| Task | Which moves (trailer, putaway, replenishment, line feed) and the share of the site's pallet moves they cover |
| Hours | Scheduled hours versus productive hours per truck, with a definition of "production hours" |
| Rate | Pallet moves per truck-hour, average over representative weeks, separate from the best week |
| Human help | Share of moves needing remote or on-site help, and staff assigned per truck on each shift |
| Exceptions | What the truck cannot do at your site (load heights, rack types, damaged pallets, trailer types) |
| Commercial status | Paid fleet, paid pilot or free trial, and whether the customer has added a second site |
| Customer confirmation | A statement the customer will publish under its own name |
For trailer work, compare these answers with our guide to robot trailer loading versus unloading, which covers the carton-unloading robots that work the same docks. The same customer test is applied to Agility's Digit humanoid and Symbotic's Walmart systems, and more coverage is on our warehouse robots topic page.
The next checkpoints are Symbotic's fourth-quarter and fiscal 2026 results on November 23, 2026, and its annual report that follows, which may say more about Fox; any Walmart update on its FoxBot program; and Armada or Holman naming further sites. This guide will be reviewed when one of those is published, or within 90 days.
How the sources were used
Customer releases and annual reports are treated as the customer's own statements. Vendor case pages are treated as vendor claims, and named customer staff quoted on them are noted. The Cohen pilots quote appears in the same words in the Fool transcript and in The Robot Report; other call quotes are from the Fool transcript. Regulator notices and listed-company releases are used for financial facts. Absence findings ("no mention of Fox") come from text searches of the filings named. Calculations are simple divisions and multiplications of published figures, labeled as Servospace arithmetic. Corrections can be sent through Servospace's contact page.