Competition days at the Amazon Picking Challenge 2016

Our first competition day started with a lot of work for our team. To compensate for inaccuracies in our object detection, we decided to implement force detection during pick-up and we adapted our pipeline to take an extra scan after picking up an item. This made picking of the items out of the bin a lot more robust, but we would lose a lot of time taking the extra scans of our objects.

 Our first challenge was the stow-task, where our robot had to pick up randomly placed items from a tote and place them in a shelf. After we mis-detected two objects, we decided to opt for a restart of the challenge. After the restart we did a lot better, we recognized one item based on our 2D-feature recognition algorithm and successfully placed it in the shelf. After that we also detected another item correctly, but ran out of time before we could stow it in the shelf. In the end we managed to end up in 12th place out of 16 teams.

For the second challenge, our robot had to perform the task of picking items from the shelf and placing them in the tote. Our challenge started a lot tougher, since all of the four items we could not pick up with our gripper were part of our assignment. We managed to detect, pick up and place two out of twelve items. However, one of these items was not picked up correctly, so we got some points deducted for that. In total, our team managed get to 12th place in this second challenge as well.