News

The first Amazon Picking Challenge, a new competition in robot manipulation, just concluded today and Prof. Kostas Bekris’ team ended up on the 7th spot out of the 28 teams that participated (40 of them initially registered). His team collected 17 points for picking items out of a shelf, which was close to the score of the 3rd team but some calibration and robot driver problems caused us to drop an item and lose the 3rd spot. The first team was from the Technical University of Berlin and the second from MIT. It was overall a great experience for our students and provided new opportunities to link with the industry. Here is a link to a Bloomberg video that after about 20 seconds features our team and robot: http://bloom.bg/1d1UrLV