Pick and place is __________.

• A. a person who packs boxes next to a robot
• B. a name for an industrial robot company
• C. a robot that moves on an X/Y grid
• D. a robot that picks up bombs to disarm them

Answer: (C)

Pick and place is the basic automated task where a robot grabs an object from a starting position and releases it at a new location. In many setups, this is implemented with a Cartesian-style robot that moves along two linear axes, the X and Y, to reach the object, pick it up, and move it to its destination before placing it down. That movement on an X/Y plane captures the essence of the task, which is about moving items from one location to another after grasping them.

The other descriptions don’t fit this idea: a person packing boxes describes a human action rather than the robotic operation; naming a company is unrelated to what the task is; and a bomb-disarming robot describes a specialized mission, not the general pick-and-place action.