[ros-users] Amazon Picking Challenge

[Joe Romano]

Amazon Picking Challenge @ ICRA 2015

Greetings colleagues! We are excited to announce a new manipulation contest
to be held at ICRA in May 2015 (http://icra2015.org) in Seattle, WA, USA.

This may be of particular interest to the ROS community since we are
encouraging researchers to push their new developments into the open-source
domain (as a requirement to be eligible for the available travel support
and contest prizes). We hope this leads to the contribution of new and
interesting work within ROS.

------------------

Amazon is able to quickly package and ship millions of items to customers
from a network of fulfillment centers all over the globe. This wouldn't be
possible without leveraging cutting-edge advances in technology. Amazon's
automated warehouses are successful at removing much of the walking and
searching for items within a warehouse. However, commercially viable
automated picking in unstructured environments still remains a difficult
challenge. In order to spur the advancement of this fundamental technology
we are excited to be organizing the first Amazon Picking Challenge at ICRA
2015. It is our goal to strengthen the ties between the industrial and
academic robotic communities and promote shared and open solutions to some
of the big problems in unstructured automation. To this end the contest
will be awarding travel grants to ICRA 2015, practice equipment, and a
large prize pool for the competition winners.

This competition will challenge entrants to build their own robot hardware
and software that can attempt simplified versions of the general task of
picking items from shelves. The robots will be presented with a stationary
lightly populated inventory shelf and be asked to pick a subset of the
products and put them on a table. The challenge combines object
recognition, pose recognition, grasp planning, compliant manipulation,
motion planning, task planning, task execution, and error detection and
recovery. The robots will be scored by how many items are picked in a fixed
amount of time, with $26,000 in prizes being awarded. Participants will be
encouraged to share and disseminate their approach to improve future
challenge results and industrial implementations.
------------------

Find out more and sign up for email updates at the challenge website:
http://amazonpickingchallenge.org
Or email us at:
committee at amazonpickingchallenge.org


-Joe
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.ros.org/pipermail/ros-users/attachments/20141002/fb122c46/attachment.html>