Cartman: The Low-Cost Cartesian Manipulator that Won the Amazon Robotics Challenge

Ahstract-The Amazon Robotics Challenge enlisted sixteen teams to each design a pick-and-place robot for autonomous warehousing, addressing development in robotic vision and manipulation. This paper presents the design of our custom-built, cost-effective, Cartesian robot system Cartman, which won first place in the competition finals by stowing 14 (out of 16) and picking all 9 items in 27 minutes, scoring a total of 272 points. We highlight our experience-centred design methodology and key aspects of our system that contributed to our competitiveness. We believe these aspects are crucial to building robust and effective robotic systems.

[1]  Ivan Lundberg,et al.  Safety of collaborative industrial robots: Certification possibilities for a collaborative assembly robot concept , 2011, 2011 IEEE International Symposium on Assembly and Manufacturing (ISAM).

[2]  Jürgen Leitner,et al.  Mechanical Design of a Cartesian Manipulator for Warehouse Pick and Place , 2017 .

[3]  Steven M. LaValle,et al.  RRT-connect: An efficient approach to single-query path planning , 2000, Proceedings 2000 ICRA. Millennium Conference. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. Symposia Proceedings (Cat. No.00CH37065).

[4]  Martijn Wisse,et al.  Team Delft's Robot Winner of the Amazon Picking Challenge 2016 , 2016, RoboCup.

[5]  Helge J. Ritter,et al.  Platform portable anthropomorphic grasping with the bielefeld 20-DOF shadow and 9-DOF TUM hand , 2007, 2007 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[6]  Li Fei-Fei,et al.  ImageNet: A large-scale hierarchical image database , 2009, CVPR.

[7]  Tristan Perez,et al.  Autonomous Sweet Pepper Harvesting for Protected Cropping Systems , 2017, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters.

[8]  Siddhartha S. Srinivasa,et al.  Benchmarking in Manipulation Research: Using the Yale-CMU-Berkeley Object and Model Set , 2015, IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine.

[9]  Ian D. Reid,et al.  RefineNet: Multi-path Refinement Networks for High-Resolution Semantic Segmentation , 2016, 2017 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR).

[10]  Ian Taylor,et al.  Robotic pick-and-place of novel objects in clutter with multi-affordance grasping and cross-domain image matching , 2017, 2018 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).

[11]  Stefan Ulbrich,et al.  The OpenGRASP benchmarking suite: An environment for the comparative analysis of grasping and dexterous manipulation , 2011, 2011 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[12]  Peter I. Corke,et al.  The ACRV picking benchmark: A robotic shelf picking benchmark to foster reproducible research , 2016, 2017 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).

[13]  Peter I. Corke,et al.  Design of a Multi-Modal End-Effector and Grasping System: How Integrated Design helped win the Amazon Robotics Challenge , 2017, ICRA 2017.

[14]  Oliver Brock,et al.  Analysis and Observations From the First Amazon Picking Challenge , 2016, IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering.

[15]  Peter I. Corke,et al.  Semantic Segmentation from Limited Training Data , 2017, 2018 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).

[16]  Gustavo Carneiro,et al.  Learning Local Image Descriptors with Deep Siamese and Triplet Convolutional Networks by Minimizing Global Loss Functions , 2015, 2016 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR).

[17]  Morgan Quigley,et al.  ROS: an open-source Robot Operating System , 2009, ICRA 2009.

[18]  Heinrich M. Jaeger,et al.  Universal robotic gripper based on the jamming of granular material , 2010, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[19]  Sven Behnke,et al.  Fast Object Learning and Dual-arm Coordination for Cluttered Stowing, Picking, and Packing , 2018, 2018 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).

[20]  Zhao Yi,et al.  A Robust Robot Design for Item Picking , 2018, 2018 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).