A robotic arm that combines a suction cup, a "two-fingered" gripper and a 3D depth-sensing camera has won Amazon's latest warehouse bot competition. Team Delft's machine triumphed over its rivals at both of the two tasks. One involved selecting products from a container, picking them up and putting them on a shelf. The other was doing the actions in reverse. Amazon already uses robots to move goods about its buildings but relies on humans to stock its shelves.

Last year, Amazon kicked off its inaugural Picking Challenge to encourage teams to create robots able to perform the task of an Amazon stock picker. This year the competition was expanded to include not only picking items from a shelf and placing them in a container, but the reverse as well – and a team from the Netherlands has claimed victories in both. This year's pick task, which carries over from last year but has been made more difficult, requires robots to grab target items from a shelf and place them in a container. Conversely, the stow task involves the robot removing items from a box and placing them back on the shelf. They sound like very simple tasks for a human, but for robot competitors it requires a sophisticated array of sensors, moving parts and artificial intelligence.

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!

The APC's focus is on one core -- but extremely important -- area of robotic competency: manipulating objects in the world. The competition scenario was a Kivalike warehouse in which the robot had 20 minutes to pick items off a shelf and put them into a plastic tote. The 12 bins on the shelf were stocked with 25 products that posed a range of perception or manipulation challenges. Each bin had one target item. A robot received a base score of 10 points for successfully picking the target item, with bonus points for cluttered bins or difficult items.

Sure, Alphago--a Google computer that plays the game Go--beat Lee Sedol, the world's reigning master of the game. The machine revolution is nigh! Except there's one crucial thing AlphaGo couldn't do: pick up those black and white Go stones and put them down on the board. A Google programmer had to do that. "Maybe the hardest part is not playing the game but moving the pieces," says Siddhartha Srinivasa, a roboticist at Carnegie Mellon University.