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
problem does not have a sufficiently optimized solution yet. 3.1 Robot
In this report, we will explore the usage of robotics in order In order to be able to grab things, it also has a robotic arm.
to make putting things on tables more efficient. 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
1 Introduction parts of the robot are depicted in Figure 2.
Everyone has to put something on a table at some point. 3.2 Algorithm
However, picking things up is quite a tedious task. Reducing
the effort needed to do this would make everyone’s life much The algorithm is very simple and consists of the following
easier. steps:
We will introduce a novel robot to tackle this problem in
1. Grab something using the pickup() function
a much more efficient way. The efficiency is assessed in a
thorough evaluation.
Data sets avg. speed avg. error
2 Related Work
The work of First and Second (2014) and others (Third, Robot 125.1 2.2
2015) is fundamental in this research area. They show how Human 87.4 2.1
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 Table 1: Pickup speed and error comparison.
efficient as ours, as can be seen in Section 4.

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

Figure 2: The different components of the proposed robot.

5 Future Work
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
Tears very bumpy ground, e.g. gardening.
Robotic Support
6 Conclusion
We have developed a novel robotic solution to the problem
of picking things up and putting them on a table. Despite
No Tears the shortcomings described in Section 5, we still believe
in widespread usage of the presented robot within the next
decade.

Figure 3: Qualitative assessment of emotional changes

during the period of robotic support.

4 Evaluation
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.