Team Applied Robotics chosen for Amazon Picking Challenge Travel Reimbursement Award

Team Applied Robotics has been selected for a travel reimbursement award. 41 teams applied with videos of their progress so far. Our entry was chosen as one of the 25 most competitive submissions as can be found on the Amazon Picking Challenge news page.

The official Amazon Picking Challenge objects also arrived this week which will help immensely in improving our vision algorithms.

We look forward to the last two months leading to the Amazon Picking Challenge at ICRA 2015.

Improved vision algorithm and end effector design

Since our last update we have been working on further improvements to our vision algorithms and on a brand new end effector design.

The new end effector uses vacuum technology to be able to pick a wide variety of objects. The long and narrow design allows us to pick up objects from the back of the shelf and allows us to pick objects from the top and the side.

 The freshly arrived Kiva shelf comes in handy for testing these improvements.
 Please see the video below for our proof of concept tests for the vision and end effector design:

 

KIVA shelf

This week we had a special delivery from KIVA Systems in the US. A 64 kg package arrived with all the components to construct our own KIVA shelf to prepare for the Amazon Picking Challenge. It is a modular system and took about an hour to put together.

This type of shelf is used in highly automated Amazon warehouses. Note that the final picking task is still left to a human in the video below: