The experiment started working towards the second milestone, a two-robot grasp of a box. The idea is that both robots pick boxes independently, until one encounters a too heavy box, in which case it waits until the other robot assists it in picking it up. The two challenges are to have the robots move without colliding into each other (how does a robot know where the other robot is going to?), and to find a way to control both robots when they jointly hold a box. To test these algorithms, a simulation environment is first setup such that no harm is done to real robots in the experimental phase of development.

The ContainerBot experiment has completed its first major milestone experiment. A workcell was built which contains one the left side of the robot a corner with a pile of different boxes and on the right hand side a drop-off slope. The robot could clean up the pile of boxes of different shapes and weights and move them to a drop off  point. With little time for fine-tuning the experiment, the robot did already very well and pick-and-places every box well below 10 seconds. The experiment will now continue to detect too heavy boxes and use two robots which jointly pick the box and bring it to the drop-off point.