Success for TU Delft. A special team from the technical university has won a competition from etailer Amazon in collaboration with Delft Robotics. The team built a robotic arm to speed up the warehouse process.
Amazon's requirement was that the robotic arm had to recognise products completely autonomously. Something that is difficult for many robots. The task, which involves grabbing items from a large bin and placing them in the right place, is called bin picking. "One of the most difficult situations for robots," Kanter van Deurzen, one of the team leaders of the Delft engineers, explains to NOS. "The robots have to be able to deal with variety, and work in an unstructured environment," Carlos Hernández Corbato of the TU Delft Robotics Institute says about this.
Amazon Picking Challenge
The Amazon Picking Challenge 2016 took place during RoboCup 2016, the famous international robot competition in Leipzig. The competition consisted of two separate finals. In the 'stow task', the robot had to pick products from a container and place them on the shelf. In the 'pick task', the product had to be placed from the shelf into the container. Van Deuren attributes TU Delft's team's win to good preparation. "We built a very robust system that hardly makes any mistakes when picking items. This is where our knowledge of 'bin-picking' comes in handy. With this, we are working on a new generation of flexible and smart robot systems that can be widely deployed."
In practice, the robots should speed up the order picking process. "Nowadays, if you order something in the evening, we expect it to be delivered the next day. This robot meets that challenge." The winners expect that employees will not disappear from the shop floor completely, but will work together with the robot.
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