Team Applied Robotics wins Dutch derby in Denmark

During last week's RoboBusiness conference in Odense, Denmark, both Dutch teams exhibited their robot and prepared for the Amazon Picking Challenge by engaging in a friendly competition.

Team Applied Robotics arrived tuesday evening, the day before the conference started and we wasted no time setting up our system. Setting up our hardware was done in under 45 minutes, but our software was not yet fully tested and still needed quite some tweaking. Luckily wednesday was a relatively quiet day at the exhibition floor, so we could use our time testing the system and implementing a lot of improvements to our path planner.
Among other things, we are now able to publish collision objects and an octomap and our path planner is able to reliably plan the safest path in and out of the bins.

Friday was the day of our competition against Delft. We had agreed on a subset of items to be picked from the shelf and recruited an arbitrary judge to randomly place the items in the shelf. A large crowd had gathered to watch as the judge counted down until the start of our 10-minute match.

We were off to a quick start, and within 40 seconds we dropped our first item in the tote. Team Delft, however had some driver problems and had to opt for a restart. By the time Delft had restarted, we were already in a comfortable lead of 3 items. Picking up the rest of the items went smoothly, apart from the last one, which was placed in such a way our path planner could not find a collision-free path. Meanwhile, Delft was closing in on our score of 5 out of 6 items and deposited their third items with 2 minutes still on the clock. Luckily for us they did not manage to pick another item before the time ran out and therefore we won with 5 items against 3.

This challenge was a great opportunity for both teams to prepare for the real competition in Leipzig and we would like to thank team Delft for the great atmosphere and organization of this event.