Robert Gordon, an economist at Northwestern University, likes to play a game he calls Find the Robot. As he goes about his everyday life - shopping, traveling through airports - he looks for machines performing tasks that humans once handled. Most of what he sees doesn't impress him.

At its core, a warehouse management system offers warehouses and distributors a tool to help improve customer service. That means knowing what you have, where you have it and how soon you can promise delivery.

By using adaptive software tools, you not only can lengthen the life of your existing WMS products, including legacy systems and systems no longer supported, you now can have all kinds of new functionality at your fingertips.

Innovation of the Year: Automating the assembly of pallets that incorporate cases of multiple dimensions leads to big savings in labor costs, a safer work environment, a streamlined D.C. operation, and better service to retail outlets. Innovator of the Year: The Liquor Control Board of Ontario; Runner-Up: Lennox Residential; Finalists: Hewlett-Packard, U.S. Marine Corps, Shared Support Services of Southeastern Ontario

With robots like BigDog and the Terminator-like Atlas, Google's robotics efforts have been a smash success - if you measure by YouTube views and buzz. Amazon's work has been more behind scenes (apart from the widely discussed plans for delivery drones). But Amazon's energies in robotics have also had a more immediate payoff than Google's "moonshots." The differing philosophies illustrate how Amazon and Google have taken starkly different paths so far in the race to automate the physical world.

Robot orders and shipments in North America set new records in the first nine months of 2015, according to Robotic Industries Association (RIA), the industry's trade group.