Team Delft Wins Amazon Picking Challenge

With warehouses full of robots that can move shelves from place to place, the only reason that Amazon needs humans anymore is to pick things off of those shelves and put them into boxes, and pick other things out of boxes and put them onto those shelves. Amazon wants robots to be doing these tasks too, but it's a hard problem--hard enough that the enormous bajillion dollar company is asking other roboticists to solve it for them. The first Amazon Picking Challenge was held at ICRA last year in Seattle, Amazon's home town. Amazon followed it up this year with another, tougher challenge at RoboCup 2016, which just wrapped up. And the winner is...Team Delft from the Netherlands!