Robotics and Biology Laboratory

Amazon Picking Challenge 2015

© RBO

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In May 2015, our Team RBO won a prestigious international robotics challenge, the Amazon Picking Challenge. This challenge aims to solve one of the last problems in warehouse automation: identifying and grasping objects from a warehouse shelf.

The goal of the competition was to develop a robotic system with the ability to fulfill a fictitious order by autonomously picking the ordered items from a shelf. The competition posed a set of challenging problems: the robot had to visually perceive and grasp a wide variety of objects; the exact position in each bin of the shelf was not known beforehand; and the robot had to act fully autonomously, without any human intervention being allowed.

Our robot was able to win the competition by picking 10 out of 12 objects, outperforming 25 teams from Europe, USA and Asia, amongst them teams from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), UC Berkeley as well as many robotics companies.

Video Material

Official summary video by Amazon: http://www.amazonpickingchallenge.org/ 

Our run, sped by 4x: https://youtu.be/DuFtwpxQnFI

Our run, original speed: https://youtu.be/UrpMfdj-Mpc

Video showing the perception algorithm running on our robot:https://youtu.be/TsVUQtRNIts

Interview with Sebastian at the Deutscher Logistik Kongress (in German): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5yjIw3D9JQ 

Related Publications

2018

Eppner, Clemens; Höfer, Sebastian; Jonschkowski, Rico; Martín-Martín, Roberto; Sieverling, Arne; Wall, Vincent; Brock, Oliver
Four aspects of building robotic systems: lessons from the Amazon Picking Challenge 2015
Autonomous Robots, 42 (7) :1459–1475
October 2018
Publisher: Springer US
Correll, Nikolaus; Bekris, Kostas E.; Berenson, Dmitry; Brock, Oliver; Causo, Albert; Hauser, Kris; Okada, Kei; Rodriguez, Alberto; Romano, Joseph M.; Wurman, Peter R.
Analysis and Observations From the First Amazon Picking Challenge
IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering, 15 (1) :172-188
January 2018

2016

Jonschkowski, Rico; Eppner, Clemens; Höfer, Sebastian; Martín-Martín, Roberto; Brock, Oliver
Probabilistic Multi-Class Segmentation for the Amazon Picking Challenge
IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, Page 1-7
October 2016
Eppner, Clemens; Höfer, Sebastian; Jonschkowski, Rico; Martín-Martín, Roberto; Sieverling, Arne; Wall, Vincent; Brock, Oliver
Lessons from the Amazon Picking Challenge: Four Aspects of Building Robotic Systems
Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems
Publisher: AnnArbor, Michigan
June 2016
Correll, Nikolaus; Bekris, Kostas E.; Berenson, Dmitry; Brock, Oliver; Causo, Albert; Hauser, Kris; Okada, Kei; Rodriguez, Alberto; Romano, Joseph M.; Wurman, Peter R.
Lessons from the Amazon Picking Challenge
ArXiv e-prints
2016