Robotics

Amazon Picking Challenge aimed at improving warehouse robotics

Amazon Picking Challenge aimed at improving warehouse robotics
The Amazon Picking Challenge aimed at finding new ways of automating warehouse operations
The Amazon Picking Challenge aimed at finding new ways of automating warehouse operations
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The Amazon Picking Challenge was a highlight of the 2015 ICRA conference
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The Amazon Picking Challenge was a highlight of the 2015 ICRA conference
The Amazon Picking Challenge aimed at finding new ways of automating warehouse operations
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The Amazon Picking Challenge aimed at finding new ways of automating warehouse operations
The Amazon Picking Challenge had 31 international teams competing
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The Amazon Picking Challenge had 31 international teams competing
Some of the Amazon Picking Challenge task items
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Some of the Amazon Picking Challenge task items
The Amazon Picking Challenge initiator Peter Wurman
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The Amazon Picking Challenge initiator Peter Wurman
The Amazon Picking Challenge competitor robot using a frame arrangement
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The Amazon Picking Challenge competitor robot using a frame arrangement
The Amazon Picking Challenge used autonomous robots
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The Amazon Picking Challenge used autonomous robots
The Amazon Picking Challenge team using a Baxter robot
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The Amazon Picking Challenge team using a Baxter robot
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Complete list of Amazon Picking Challenge items
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Complete list of Amazon Picking Challenge items
The Amazon Picking Challenge competition pod
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The Amazon Picking Challenge competition pod
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One of the biggest events at the recent 2015 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in Seattle was the first Amazon Picking Challenge, in which 31 teams from around the world competed for US$26,000 in prizes. The challenge set entrants with the real-world task of building a robot that can do the same job as an Amazon stock picker.

Internet commerce may have revolutionized shopping, but it still relies on armies of people toiling away in warehouses to get the goods out to consumers, with Amazon alone hiring 80,000 temporary warehouse workers over last year's holiday rush. It's an obvious target for automation, so in 212 Amazon spent US$775 million to acquire robotics company Kiva Systems and installed 15,000 warehouse robots.

According to Amazon, the Kiva robotic system sped things up by reversing the job of stock picking. Instead of the worker going to the shelves and picking out items, the shelves came to the workers, who picked and packed the goods. The shelves even helped them by identifying items and showing workers where they go by means of lasers, and even confirmed the item's bar code before packing.

The new system is faster and more efficient, but having humans pick the items off the mobile shelves by hand is still an expensive, tedious task that's an ecommerce bottleneck. This is what inspired the Amazon Picking Challenge, which seeks to find ways to replace the human stock picker with robots.

The Amazon Picking Challenge initiator Peter Wurman
The Amazon Picking Challenge initiator Peter Wurman

According to Amazon Chief Technology Officer Peter Wurman, who initiated the challenge, the task of picking items off the shelf may seem simple, but it involves all domains of robotics. The robot has to capable of object and pose recognition. It must be able to plan its grasps, adjust manipulations, plan how to move, and be able to execute tasks while noticing and correcting any errors.

This might suggest that the robots would need to be of a new, specialized design, but for the Picking Challenge, Amazon made no such requirement. According to one participant we talked to, the more important factors were sensors and computer modelling, so ICRA 2015 saw all sorts of robots competing, such as the general purpose Baxter and PR2, industrial arms of various sizes, and even special-built frames that move up, down, left or right to position the arm. Even the manipulators used by the various teams ranged from hooks, to hand-like graspers, and vacuum pickups.

Some of the Amazon Picking Challenge task items
Some of the Amazon Picking Challenge task items

The rules of the Picking Challenge were based on a simplified version of the warehouse goods picking task. Each team was provided with a stationary Kiva shelf pod consisting of 12 cubbyholes holding 24 items of various sizes and weights, such as books, cat toys, and cookies. Each team was given a list of 12 items and 20 minutes for the robot to select them and place them in a tote bin correctly without damaging them. Points were scored based on how many items were correctly picked against incorrectly picked, dropped, or broken items.

According to Wurman, the challenge went off as planned, though the participants did run into unexpected problems in the transition from computer models and laboratory tests to a more realistic setting. Other observers told us that the robots were much faster than originally estimated, and that the main problem was with the manipulators having to operate in the confines of the cubby holes and at unanticipated angles.

The RBO team from the Technical University of Berlin (TU Berlin) took out the $20,000 first prize, while Team MIT claimed the $5,000 second prize and Team Grizzly from Dataspeed Inc and Oakland University took out the $1,000 third prize.

View gallery - 11 images
7 comments
7 comments
Schreibtribe
This is friggin cool. Any video of the robots at work?
Madlyb
This has to be the funniest challenge. We have been trying to automate pick and pack for decades and no mechanical device comes close to the visual recognition and dexterity required to perform the task. $26K is a sad joke.
If anything, this should be an X-prize level challenge because you are solving two of the most challenging issues in automation today.
BundyGil
$26,000 first prize is so paltry compared the $776 million Amazon spent on their other part of their automated stock presentation project, one wonders what they hoped to gain. Nothing much, I would think and I would also think they didn't get much. Just a rehash if old and failed ideas.
b2p
People, please don't get angry with me but it would be really nice to offer prizes for clever ways to get people back to work in meaningful jobs. In 15-20 years when the economy is in permanent full remission due to no jobs, no paychecks, no purchasing, and all the cash is sitting idle in the vaults of the 1% we will ask ourselves what happened?
Bruce H. Anderson
Yes, $26,000 is a joke. And the threshold of 12 items in 20 minutes is incredibly low, since there are plenty of "goods-to-man" systems that can deliver 800+ pieces per hour. That is over 22 times faster, and these speeds are attainable now (true story) by a person with one arm. Maybe Amazon is taking baby steps, or just hungry for publicity, or trying to justify the KIVA buy.
Daishi
@Bruce So far Kiva seems to have been a success at least from a productivity standpoint.
The technology just isn't there yet for pickers to be a direct replacement for humans so I'm sure Amazon set the prize low when they set the bar low.
One solution I can think of is to identify a small handful of items the robots would be able to pick reliably and store those ~20-30 items in a separate section of the warehouse. Depending how commonly sold those items are it could lessen the burden on human employees having robots handle just those. As technology improves maybe that becomes 50-60 items instead.
Telling some of the things apart and stocking them in a way a robotic picker could select them (Fire TV stick vs 50 shades of grey etc.) would be fairly trivial. It may be a case where Kiva brings over a shelf full of only copies of a single item leaving less room for error of selecting the wrong item. What percentage of their pickers time is spent picking 100-200 of their best selling items? It's probably significant.
I suspect there is probably some amount of labor (like 30%) where it becomes worth the cost to deploy a system like this and start improving on it in iterations.
Riaanh
@b2p, I am with you on this. They should rather spend this $26,000 on researching ways in which society may be structured in the future to cater for masses of un-employed, well fed, but bored people. It is not a solution to have them spend their time procreating, drinking and doing crime. Well, at least the top 1% of the population will be even richer.
This 80 000 temp jobs which will eventually be lost is just a drop in the bucket.....