Amazon Picking Challenge

A 2015–2017 Amazon-run competition for robots that pick items off warehouse shelves.

Amazon launched this competition to address a step in e-commerce warehouses — pulling various items off shelves — that was still done by hand. The first edition was held at ICRA 2015 with 26 teams. Robots had to autonomously identify and retrieve specified items from shelf bins within a time limit, with items varying widely in shape and material and often obscured or wrapped in transparent packaging. A 2016 edition added the task of placing items onto shelves, and after being renamed the Amazon Robotics Challenge (ARC) in 2017, the competition ended. It exposed the difficulty of perception, grasp planning, and end-effector design, with suction cups combined with deep-learning recognition becoming a common approach, and it's seen as an important driver of later research into warehouse picking and unstructured (bin) grasping.

ExampleAfter the first 2015 event, organizers surveyed the 26 competing teams and published a paper analyzing how mechanical design, perception, and planning choices related to performance.

Also called

Amazon Robotics Challenge, APC, ARC

Related

Order Picking · Bin Picking · Vacuum Suction Cup · Amazon Robotics · Benchmark · DARPA Robotics Challenge

Sources

Analysis and Observations from the First Amazon Picking Challenge (arXiv 1601.05484)

As of

2017