Demonstration of Team Applied Robotics at RoboBusiness Europe

Team Applied Robotics was challenged by Team Delft to show off our robot at the RoboBusiness Europe Conference in Odense, Denmark. (1st of june untill the 3rd of june). Of course we were thrilled to take up this challenge, also because it is the best preparation we can get for the actual Amazon Picking Challenge in July.

Our two teams will be demonstrating our robot systems during the conference in a friendly competition. This will allow us to gauge the competition and fine-tune our strategy for the competition in Leipzig.

Read more about this event at:
http://www.robobusiness.eu/

We will keep you updated on the final preparations for this mini-competition in the next week!

Vacuum gripper re-design

For the new Amazon Picking Challenge we decided to improve our gripper design. The vacuum concept we used last year worked pretty well, but since this year the bins will be more crowded, our gripper needs to be even thinner.

Also for the bin-picking part of the challenge we could use an extra degree of freedom.

To make this new design, we've enlisted the help of last-year's mechanical engineer Maurice Ramaker and our latest addition to the team: Fabian Gouwens! We have developed a lot of different concepts and decided on two concepts for prototyping.

We have 3D printed the two concepts and put them to the test.

Team Applied Robotics to participate in APC 2016

On June 30th, 2016, the second installment of the Amazon Picking Challenge will take place as part of the Robocup event in Leipzig, Germany.

We, as Team Applied Robotics, are happy to announce that we have been selected to participate again in the Amazon Picking Challenge!

One of our team members from last year, John Gardenier, has left for a PhD position in Sydney and will not participate this year.
However, we are very happy to welcome Wim Abbeloos as a new team member! He joins Berend Kupers and Simon Jansen to form this year's core development team.

We' re very excited for the challenge this year, which includes not only picking items from the shelf. but also picking items from a bin and stowing them onto the shelf.

We've restarted development and will from now on regularly update this blog in the coming months.

Team Applied Robotics APC 2015 Summary

After participating in the inaugural Amazon Picking Challenge held alongside the IEEE ICRA 2015 conference in Seattle, we would like to describe our system in more detail. Our system was designed and implemented over a six-month period in our free time on a shoestring budget and delivered satisfactory results, resulting in a 10th place out of 28 participating teams from all over the world.

One of the first design decisions we made was to use a vacuum gripper as a mechanical solution was too large to be able to grab objects placed in the back of the shelf. An additional benefit was that compliant gripping was easy to achieve.

The robot arm we used was a UR5. Because we had access to the same robot for testing as that would be supplied at APC, we did not have to ship the actual robot. We did, however, need to ensure the robot base and gripper could be mounted and transported easily. We designed a base that could be taken apart completely and reassembled quickly. The gripper and camera bracket was also quickly mounted onto the end of the robot arm with just a couple of bolts. After assembly only two things needed to be calibrated: the position of the camera with respect to the robot arm and the position of the robot with respect to the cabinet. By defining a clear procedure for the set-up and calibration, the system was up and running within an hour.

The software architecture was based on ROS with separate modules for strategy, perception, motion planning and the interface to the UR controller. The motion planning used a heuristic approach to create Cartesian paths between the pick-up position (as determined by the perception module) and the drop-off position. For checking the Cartesian paths for collisions and reachability, URDF models of the robot and the shelf were used. After ensuring a collision-free path had been found, the robot controller executed the linear paths.

To acquire depth information, we used the Kinect V2 sensor mounted on the robot arm. This gave us sufficient resolution although issues with reflection due to the Time of Flight technique meant we needed careful filtering of the point clouds before processing. 

For distinguishing objects from the shelf, recognising them and determining their poses, we took a very pragmatic approach. Because the pose of cabinet was known, we could easily filter the required bin from the pointcloud. Then we used basic PCL functionality to segment the objects. Here, we assumed that objects were not touching. Although this was true for the majority of the bins, we knew that picking all objects would be unlikely. From each object segmented from the shelf we determined the dimensions and matched them against the target object. If there was a match, the grasp poses of the object were determined by approximating the object by a bounding box. Using this approach, we were able to correctly pick approximately 80% of the objects in realistic shelf set-ups.

Amazon Picking Challenge final results

On Thursday we had a meeting about the future of the Amazon Picking Challenge with representatives of all teams. We talked about how the results and code can be shared best, what can be done to make the challenge more interesting for spectators, how it can be organised next year and who would be interested in competing again.

In the evening Amazon hosted drinks and it was great to mingle and discuss approaches with other teams. The final standings can be found below. Team Applied Robotics placed 10th of 27 teams, with 11 points.

Conquering some of the most difficult items to pick

Competition report day 2

On Wednesday morning team MIT scored 88 points and team RBO from TUBerlin 148! There were some other interesting runs with a robotic humanoid hand and dual arm Yaskawa Motoman systems. 

Team RBO

Team RBO

At the end of Wednesday Team Applied Robotics was at shared 9th place. On Thursday morning the two final teams will have their runs. 

Competition report day 1

After arriving in Seattle, Team Applied Robotics wasted no time setting up our equipment. On Monday evening we could already set-up our frame and see the competition bays. Other teams were also busy setting up and we recognised quite a few of the robots from previous videos posted online.

The next morning, on Tuesday, we were back at the Washington State Convention Center ready to set-up for our official run at 14.00. The robot arm was stuck in traffic and only arrived on site 4 hours before our run, but luckily we were well prepared. Having practiced the entire set-up and calibration before, it took Simon and John little time to attach the gripper and camera, wire the vacuum cleaner motor and to calibrate the positions of the robot and the camera. We had plenty of time left over to test our entire system and we made some successful runs, picking items out of the cabinet. We were the only team picking multiple objects in quick succession. Soon a crowd had gathered and were filming our fast and smooth picking operation.

Around 13.00 we heard that the first team to compete had dropped out, so we would be the first team to compete in an hour. The judges arrived and confirmed the process. We got to choose a random usb stick containing our picking order and shelf layout. Ten minutes before time the judges filled the shelf. A crowd of about 50 had gathered around our bay and we started smoothly, picking the yellow duck dog toy in no time, landing us 11 points. The robot performed a wrist flip to get to the next bin in the bottom left hand corner. To grasp the second item, the glue, the robot rotated 90 degrees to pick it from the side. This resulted in the camera getting tangled in the vacuum cleaner hose and meant that upon moving into the bin the robot went into an emergency stop. We applied for our 5 minute reset period in which the shelf was restocked and we adjusted the hose cabling. After the reset we picked the first object successfully but unfortunately it got tangled again at the second object. This was the end of our official run.

Immediately afterwards, we took the opportunity to demonstrate our capabilities to the crowd. By slightly changing the orientation of the glue bottle we had a very successful run, scoring a hypothetical 67 points. Unfortunately for us, this run did not count.

During the rest of the afternoon we watched other challenges, talked with teams and gave a few interviews. By the end of the day we were still in third place. The main distinction between the teams was if we managed to pick one object or zero. No teams picked more than one item on the first day and most teams also used their reset time. While we had an unfortunate run, our system was capable of picking an entire shelf successfully, something the other teams on Tuesday didn't show. We got the comment that our system was "ready to be sold for production next week", compared to the last minute testing and hacking going on around us. About two thirds of the teams will have their runs on Wednesday.