  The Industrial Assembly Challenge at the World Robot Summit was held in 2018
to showcase the state-of-the-art of autonomous manufacturing systems. The
challenge included various tasks, such as bin picking, kitting, and assembly of
standard industrial parts into 2D and 3D assemblies. Some of the tasks were
only revealed at the competition itself, representing the challenge of "level
5" automation, i. e., programming and setting up an autonomous assembly system
in less than one day. We conducted a survey among the teams that participated
in the challenge and investigated aspects such as team composition, development
costs, system setups as well as the teams' strategies and approaches. An
analysis of the survey results reveals that the competitors have been in two
camps: those constructing conventional robotic work cells with off-the-shelf
tools, and teams who mostly relied on custom-made end effectors and novel
software approaches in combination with collaborative robots. While both camps
performed reasonably well, the winning team chose a middle ground in between,
combining the efficiency of established play-back programming with the autonomy
gained by CAD-based object detection and force control for assembly operations.
