Designing Cartman: A Cartesian Manipulator for the Amazon Robotics Challenge 2017

The Amazon Robotics Challenge enlisted sixteen teams to each design a pick-and-place robot for autonomous warehousing of everyday household items. Herein we present the design of our custom-built, Cartesian robot Cartman, which won the first place in the competition finals. We highlight our integrated, experience-centred design methodology and the key aspects of our system that contributed to our competitiveness.