Programming robotic manipulator for pick and place task

At my job at Dhristi works, we aimed to develop garbage bots for beach cleaning. My focus was on developing algorithms for a robotic arm for pick and place tasks. The application would be used to identify and pick garbage on the beach and place it on the bag/bin on top of a mobile rover (which was parallelly being developed by other team members).
  I used ROS to set up an interface between the actual robot(purchased 5DOF robotic arm) and gazebo simulator. Thus controlling the robot both in the simulated and real environment. The Figure below displays the robot being controlled by ROS in both real and simulated environments.

To grasp household objects, I compared and analyzed several available grasping techniques. And interfaced the selected technique with our simulated robot.
Figure 2 displays the scene creation in a simulated environment consisting of robot and household objects.