Amazon Robotics Challenge

Giving a robot the ability to locate an object in a cluttered environment, pick it up and then move it to some other location is not just an interesting problem to try to solve, it's a challenge at the forefront of the robotics industry today. For the third year in a row world class robotics teams from all over the world are gathering to compete in the Amazon Robotics Challenge.

These teams have been working for months or even years to build manipulators that can autonomously perform the tasks of perception, motion planning, 3D mapping, kinematics and more to locate a specific list of objects in a cluttered environment, retrieve them and place them in the desired location. The top performing teams will go home with up to $80,000 in prize money. This next project will build your skillset further toward one day being able to solve this challenge yourself!

Details of the Challenge

The environment used for the Amazon Robotics Challenge looks similar to the environment you worked with in the Kinematics Pick & Place Project. Just like in the upcoming project, the environment contains lots of different objects and the dropoff point for collected objects is a small bin.

The rules of the challenge are detailed and extensive, but some of the more interesting ones include:

• No Robots may include teleoperation or semi-autonomous user input features.
• No human interaction (remote or physical) is allowed with the Robot after the start of an attempt.
• The Team will be provided an Order File that specifies 10 target items and three orders. The Robot will then have 15 minutes to pick the three orders.

The items that teams are required to locate are a diverse collection of small products of various shapes and sizes including food and other household items. For this project, you'll actually be working with a collection of 3D models from one of the previous Amazon Challenges! If you like, you can download the current set of data and models on the challenge website.