Go ahead, hit that BUY NOW button. Procure that sweater or TV or pillow that looks like a salmon fillet. Hit that button and fulfill the purpose of a hardworking warehouse robot. Just know this: the more you rely on online shopping, the more online retailers rely on robots to deliver those products to you. Other robots scan barcodes to do inventory.

While everyone keeps saying that robots are not a job security threat, it is also true that robots are steadily getting better at tasks. Enter this little bad boy, the robot that won Amazon's Picking Challenge. A team of engineers from Netherland's TU Del have won this year's challenge, both in the picking and stowing finals. They dubbed their creation "Delft." The cool thing is their robot is no ordinary warehouse bot; it relies on a suction cup, a "two-fingered" gripper, and the combination of deep learning artificial intelligence and depth-sensing cameras to get the job done.

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.

It could be the ultimate shopping companion, able to pick and pack goods at lightning speed. A German robotic'suckbot' arm has been crowned the winner in a prestigious warehouse robot contest run by Amazon. Sixteen teams competed in Amazon's Picking Challenge this year, where robots selected specific items from containers and placed them in a tote or on a shelf. Team Delft's robotic arm robotic'suckbot' arm has been crowned the winner in a prestigious warehouse robot contest run by Amazon. It uses suction cups to lift and move objects, allowing it to easily shop.

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!