Amazon Picking Challenge
The Amazon Picking Challenge was an annual robotics competition that Amazon held from 2015 to 2017, renamed the Amazon Robotics Challenge in 2017, in which teams built robots to pick varied items from warehouse shelves.
What happened and why it matters
The Amazon Picking Challenge spotlighted the hardest remaining step in warehouse automation: reliably grasping single items of every shape. Mobile robots could already bring shelves to workers, but a person still picked each product. At the first contest, held at the ICRA conference in Seattle in 2015, Team RBO from TU Berlin won with a suction-based arm. Team Delft won in Leipzig in 2016, and in Nagoya in 2017 the Australian Centre for Robotic Vision won with Cartman, a low-cost Cartesian robot. Techniques tested there, such as suction grippers and deep-learning vision, now appear in the robotic piece-picking systems that 3PLs evaluate.
Related events
Sources
- Amazon crowns winner of first warehouse robot challenge (Engadget) engadget.com
- Aussies win Amazon Robotics Challenge (IEEE Spectrum) spectrum.ieee.org
- GPU-accelerated robot wins Amazon warehouse challenge (NVIDIA) developer.nvidia.com