Project Group/Seminar/Lab Report:
Putting Things on a Table Efficiently
Lola Learnalot
Mat. Nr.: 1234567
January 16, 2021
Figure 1: The robot as a means to put things on tables efficiently.
Abstract
Every day we pick things up from the ground and put them
on tables. Despite the ubiquitous presence of this task, this
problem does not have a sufficiently optimized solution yet.
In this report, we will explore the usage of robotics in order
to make putting things on tables more efficient.
1 Introduction
Everyone has to put something on a table at some point.
However, picking things up is quite a tedious task. Reducing
the effort needed to do this would make everyone’s life much
easier.
We will introduce a novel robot to tackle this problem in
a much more efficient way. The efficiency is assessed in a
thorough evaluation.
2 Related Work
The work of First and Second (2014) and others (Third,
2015) is fundamental in this research area. They show how
difficult it can be to pick things up and put them on a table.
All of these approaches work, but none of them is as
efficient as ours, as can be seen in Section 4.
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3 Methodology
We will now discuss our novel approach in detail.
3.1 Robot
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
the arm is a robotic hand with three fingers. The complete
robot can be seen in Figure 1, while the single parts of the
robot are depicted in Figure 2.
3.2 Robot
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
the arm is a robotic hand with three fingers. The complete
robot can be seen in Figure 1, while the single parts of the
robot are depicted in Figure 2.
3.3 Robot
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
the arm is a robotic hand with three fingers. The complete
robot can be seen in Figure 1, while the single parts of the
robot are depicted in Figure 2.
 (a) The robots body. (b) The robots arm.

Figure 2: The different components of the proposed robot.

3.4 Algorithm
The algorithm is very simple and consists of the following
steps:

1. Grab something using the pickup() function

Tears
2. Move arm to table
Robotic Support
3. Open hand with open_hand()

Due to our efficient implementation, the algorithms run time

complexity is in O(n log n). No Tears

Data sets avg. speed avg. error

Robot 125.1 2.2

Human 87.4 2.1
Figure 3: Qualitative assessment of emotional changes
Table 1: Pickup speed and error comparison. during the period of robotic support.

4 Evaluation 5 Future Work

In order to find out, how useful the proposed robot is in
reality, I will do a user study with 500 participants, some of
which are novices and some of which are experts in putting
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
grab their stuff themselves. This is qualitatively evaluated in
Figure 3.
While our robot is already able to outperform most of our
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
of picking things up and putting them on a table. Despite

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the shortcomings described in Section 5, we still believe
in widespread usage of the presented robot within the next
decade.