Cascade Robotics Opens Its First Fully Automated Warehouse

Cascade Robotics opened what it describes as the first fully automated warehouse of its kind on Thursday, an 800,000-square-foot facility on the outskirts of Riverside that operates without human workers on its floor.

The warehouse relies on a fleet of roughly 1,400 mobile robots working alongside automated sorting arms and conveyor systems, all coordinated by software the company has developed over the past six years. Human staff remain on-site, but in supervisory and maintenance roles rather than physically handling inventory.

“This isn’t about removing people from logistics. It’s about removing people from the parts of logistics that were never good for them in the first place,” said Tomas Reyes, Cascade Robotics’ founder and chief executive, at a ribbon-cutting event attended by regional officials and several major retail clients.

The economics behind the shift

Cascade executives said the facility processes orders roughly 35 percent faster than a comparable warehouse staffed by humans, primarily because the robotic system can operate continuously without shift changes or rest breaks. The company would not disclose the cost of building the facility but said it expects to recoup the investment within four years through labor savings and throughput gains.

Labor groups have raised concerns about what full automation means for warehouse workers, a segment of the labor market that has grown significantly over the past two decades. A spokesperson for a regional logistics workers’ association said the opening “raises real questions about where displaced workers are supposed to go,” though Cascade said it has no current plans to automate its other, still human-staffed facilities.

“We’ve been careful about how fast we scale this,” Reyes said. “The goal was never to prove we could do this everywhere overnight.”

Broader industry implications

Several competitors in the logistics automation space have announced similar projects in recent years, though none has yet opened a facility operating at this scale without any workers directly handling inventory. Analysts who track the sector said Cascade’s Riverside facility will likely be closely watched as a test case for whether full automation can be reliably maintained during peak shopping periods, when order volumes can spike sharply.

Cascade said its next fully automated facility is already under construction near Ashford and is expected to open within eighteen months. The company declined to say how many additional sites it plans to build using the same model, citing ongoing negotiations with retail partners.