The Amazon Picking Challenge 2015 [Competitions]

T he first Amazon Picking Challenge (APC) was held at the 2015 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in Seattle, Washington, 26–27 May. The objective of the competition was to provide a challenge problem to the robotics research community that involved integrating the state of the art in object perception, motion planning, grasp planning, and task planning to manipulate real-world items in industrial settings. To that end, we posed a simplified version of the task that many humans face in warehouses all over the world, i.e., picking items from shelves and putting them into containers. In this case, the shelves were prototypical pods from Kiva Systems, and the picker had to be a fully autonomous robot. The items were a preselected set of 24 products that were commonly sold on Amazon.com and that we expected would pose varying degrees of difficulty for the contestants. On the easier end were simple cuboids like a box of straws or a spark plug. Some items were chosen because they were easy to damage, like the two soft-cover books or the package of crushable Oreo cookies. Others were harder to perceive and grasp, like the unpackaged dog toys or the black mesh pencil holder. The box of Cheez-Its posed a challenge because it could not be removed from the bin without twisting it sideways. Each pod had 12 bins, and the 25 products were distributed among the bins in such a way that each competitor had the same challenges. Each bin had one target item to be picked, with a base score of ten, 15, or 20 points depending on how many other items were in the bin. In addition, some items that were projected to be more difficult to pick were given one to three bonus points. Damaging an item incurred a five-point penalty, while picking the wrong item incurred a 12-point penalty. Each competitor had 20 min to pick as many of the 12 target items as possible and could score as many as 190 points. The competition was announced 1 October 2014. Through a series of video submissions, the organizers selected 25 teams to receive equipment grants (sample pods and products) and travel grants to help defray the costs of travel to the venue. In addition, Amazon provided US$26,000 in prize money for the winning teams. Representing 11 different countries, 26 teams made the trip to Seattle to try their robot’s hand at picking out of Kiva pods. The success of the teams was mixed, but the enthusiasm and excitement was contagious. The competition was won by RBO from the Technical University of Berlin, Germany. Its device, with a Barrett arm, a Nomadic Technologies mobile platform, and a suction cup attached to a commercial vacuum cleaner, was able to successfully pick ten of 12 correct items in under 20 min. Their score of 148 points put them well into the lead. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) team placed second, with seven items picked and 88 points (Figure 1). The MIT entry used