FRANCE: Amazon.com’s inaugural “Amazon Picking Challenge” inspired mechanical engineering and computer science students from around the world to design robots that can grab boxes of Oreo cookies and pencils from warehouse shelves and place them in bins, tasks ordinarily done by people. The Seattle retailer hopes to make its challenge a regular event that encourages innovation in robotics and steers academic research toward e-commerce automation.
Participants, however, said Amazon will have to be more generous with prize money and travel vouchers in the future for that to happen. The world’s largest e-tailer, which had 2014 revenue of $89 billion, budgeted a total of $26,000 for prizes and $60,000 for travel grants for more than 30 teams participating in the competition this week at the International Conference of Robotics and Automation in Seattle.
“If you really want strong teams, you need a bigger investment,” said Alberto Rodriguez, who led a team of graduate-level students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “This probably needs 10 times the money.”
Amazon has made big investments in automation to make its warehouses more efficient. It purchased warehouse robot-maker Kiva Systems Inc. for $775 million in 2012 and has 15,000 robots deployed in its facilities. Those machines move entire shelving units, but picking individual items is a difficult task for machines and remains better performed by people.
That was the focus of the Amazon challenge. Each team’s robot tried to pick up a shopping list of items of varying shapes and sizes – Crayola markers, a duck toy, tennis balls – stored on shelves and place them in a bin. It’s tricky for robots, which use sensors to identify objects that can be confused by plastic packaging. The machines also sometimes wrestle with how to figure out the best way to grab an object.
