In May 2015, our Team RBO won a prestigious international robotics challenge, the Amazon Picking Challenge. This challenge aims to solve one of the last problems in warehouse automation: identifying and grasping objects from a warehouse shelf.

The goal of the competition was to develop a robotic system with the ability to fulfill a fictitious order by autonomously picking the ordered items from a shelf. The competition posed a set of challenging problems: the robot had to visually perceive and grasp a wide variety of objects; the exact position in each bin of the shelf was not known beforehand; and the robot had to act fully autonomously, without any human intervention being allowed.

Our robot was able to win the competition by picking 10 out of 12 objects, outperforming 25 teams from Europe, USA and Asia, amongst them teams from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), UC Berkeley as well as many robotics companies.