I'm confused why more teams haven't used Cartesian systems. In my experience, arms with many rotational joints can become very complicated even for pick and place tasks. Do most teams use off the shelf bots or build their own?
Seems to me the problem is the inverse kinematics. The actual coordinate transformations are just trig, right?
Yeah, should be just trig. It seems the advantage the arm-based system has is more options for the pose of the end effector when grabbing stuff. But that also means you can get the arm into poses with much less manipulability. If you just need to grab items from a box, seems like the Cartesian robot is simpler, and wouldn't have that problem.
Maybe they have bad childhood memories of the crane game 0_0
That's a pretty fun picture. Imagine the crane game being played scaled up and in a warehouse. That's what we're talking about here!