Project Group/Seminar/Lab Report:

Putting Things on a Table Efficiently

Lola Learnalot
Mat. Nr.: 1234567

January 18, 2021

Figure 1: The robot as a means to put things on tables efficiently.

Abstract 3 Methodology
Every day we pick things up from the ground and put them We will now discuss our novel approach in detail.
on tables. Despite the ubiquitous presence of this task, this
3.1 Robot
problem does not have a sufficiently optimized solution yet.
In this report, we will explore the usage of robotics in order The base of the robot is a cube with wheels.
to make putting things on tables more efficient. 3.2 Robot
1 Introduction The base of the robot is a cube with wheels. In order to be
able to grab things, it also has a robotic arm. At the end of
Everyone has to put something on a table at some point. the arm is a robotic hand with three fingers. The complete
However, picking things up is quite a tedious task. Reducing robot can be seen in Figure 1, while the single parts of the
the effort needed to do this would make everyone’s life much robot are depicted in Figure 2.
easier.
We will introduce a novel robot to tackle this problem in 3.3 Algorithm
a much more efficient way. The efficiency is assessed in a The algorithm is very simple and consists of the following
thorough evaluation. steps:

2 Related Work 1. Grab something using the pickup() function

The work of First and Second (2014) and others (Third,

2015) is fundamental in this research area. They show how 4 Evaluation
difficult it can be to pick things up and put them on a table. In order to find out, how useful the proposed robot is in
All of these approaches work, but none of them is as reality, I will do a user study with 500 participants, some of
efficient as ours, as can be seen in Section 4. which are novices and some of which are experts in putting

1
 (a) The robots body. (b) The robots arm.

Figure 2: The different components of the proposed robot.

Data sets avg. speed avg. error grab their stuff themselves. This is qualitatively evaluated in
Figure 3.
Robot 125.1 2.2
Human 87.4 2.1 5 Future Work
While our robot is already able to outperform most of our
Table 1: Pickup speed and error comparison. test subjects in a fully autonomous manner, it still can be
improved with respect to the mobility. Right now, due to the
small wheels, it is not suited in situation with a potentially
very bumpy ground, e.g. gardening.

6 Conclusion
We have developed a novel robotic solution to the problem
Tears of picking things up and putting them on a table. Despite
the shortcomings described in Section 5, we still believe
Robotic Support
in widespread usage of the presented robot within the next
decade.

No Tears

Figure 3: Qualitative assessment of emotional changes

during the period of robotic support.

things on tables. Table 1 shows the average pickup speed of

our test subjects compared to the pickup speed of our robot.
During our experiments we discovered, that people being
supported by our robot are happier than people, who have to