TN Note: Workers? Who needs workers any more? The Technocrat mindset deals much better with inanimate objects like machines and robots, rather than people. With machines, efficiency can be hammered out to the last degree.
Amazon’s progress toward an army of helpful robots is one step closer: a prize for the best warehouse-working “picker” machine has gone to a robot designed by a team from TU Delft Robotics Institute and Delft Robotics, both based in the Netherlands.
The competition was held in conjunction with Germany’s Robocup in Leipzig. Announced on Monday, the winners took home $25,000, while the university of Bonn’s NimbRo won $10,000 for second place and Japanese firm PFN was awarded $5,000 for third.
The contest, in Amazon’s words, “aimed to strengthen the ties between the industrial and academic robotic communities,” and ended with slightly fewer than half of the entrants scoring more than 20 out of 40 possible points, according to a report in TechRepublic. The technology is advancing quickly: all of those contestants would have surpassed the highest scorer in the previous Picking Challenge, held just three years ago.
To compete, on 29 January the robots tried to perform a number of tasks using “books, cubic boxes, clothing, soft objects, and irregularly shaped objects” and a box provided by Amazon. The robots had to take items out of the box and put them on the correct shelf, and remove shelved items and put them into the box.
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