The challenge is over! Congrats to our winners: Team RBO (#1), Team MIT (#2), and Team Grizzly (#3)
About The Challenge
Amazon is able to quickly package and ship millions of items to customers from a network of fulfillment centers all over the globe. This wouldn't be possible without leveraging cutting-edge advances in technology. Amazon's automated warehouses are successful at removing much of the walking and searching for items within a warehouse. However, commercially viable automated picking in unstructured environments still remains a difficult challenge. In order to spur the advancement of this fundamental technology we are excited to be organizing the first Amazon Picking Challenge at ICRA 2015. It is our goal to strengthen the ties between the industrial and academic robotic communities and promote shared and open solutions to some of the big problems in unstructured automation. To this end the contest will be awarding travel grants to ICRA 2015, practice equipment, and a large prize pool for the competition winners (through Amazon, in additional to any other IEEE or ICRA grants).
This competition will challenge entrants to build their own robot hardware and software that can attempt simplified versions of the general task of picking items from shelves. The robots will be presented with a stationary lightly populated inventory shelf and be asked to pick a subset of the products and put them on a table. The challenge combines object recognition, pose recognition, grasp planning, compliant manipulation, motion planning, task planning, task execution, and error detection and recovery. The robots will be scored by how many items are picked in a fixed amount of time, with $26,000 in prizes being awarded. Participants will be encouraged to share and disseminate their approach to improve future challenge results and industrial implementations.
Need a Robot?
We encourage participants to construct and bring their own systems to the contest. Contestants are not limited to using the hardware below. For those unable to do so we are trying to partner with popular robot companies to make their platforms available for use before and during the contest. Note that the platform availability may be limited, and teams will need to coordinate with the robot providers early! The following companies have generously agreed to support contestants by providing platforms below:
