Delft Double Champions at RoboCup

A team of engineers from Delft University of Technology were double champions at the Amazon Picking Challenge, which took place in conjunction with RoboCup in Leipzig last week. The Amazon Picking Challenge aims to “strengthen the ties between the industrial and academic robotic communities and promote shared and open solutions to some of the big problems in unstructured automation”.

According to a report from TU Delft: “The challenge is divided into two separate finals: during the ‘stow task’ the robots, equipped with grippers, had to autonomously retrieve a wide range of products from a container and put them on the shelves. With the ‘pick task’, it was the other way around: the robot had to retrieve items from the shelves and put them in a container.”

Team Delft won the stow task fairly comfortably, but the pick task was a photo finish. According to Amazon’s official report on the challenge: “The competition was so close that the judges had to resort to the second tie-breaker using video replay to determine the winner. Both Team Delft and PFN finished with 105 points, but Delft achieved their first pick in a mere 30 seconds, beating PFN’s 1:07 time.”