Conclusions from an object-delivery robotic competition: SICK robot day 2014

Abstract

Contrary to controlled experiments in a laboratory, robotics competitions pose a real challenge to an intelligent autonomous system. To allow a good performance, robotic systems have to be very robust to unforeseen circumstances in a highly constrained time frame. In this paper we present the design, implementation and performance of the robotic system we developed for participation in the SICK robot day 2014, with which we achieved very good results, placing second, with the same maximum score as the first. The task of this competition was to alternately fetch and deliver objects in a simplified warehouse scenario. Participating robots had to be able to carry out different tasks, such as detecting filling and delivery stations, receiving and analysing bar-code labelled objects as well as navigating in an arena among three other robots.