Good start to last month of integration

In less than four weeks Team Applied Robotics will be competing in Seattle! In the past month we have been busy taking apart vacuum cleaners, designing a custom gripper and nozzle, integrating electronics, segmentation algorithms for the vision system, robot frame design and a custom motion coordinator.

This is a sketch of our frame to mount the robot, designed to be easy to disassemble and transport:

The gripping action is shown below:

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:

Testing Vision and Reachability

We have been testing our vision system this week. A scene is shown below with two objects placed on two planes. The vision system successfully identifies two planes with different orientations and segments the objects.

                           

Additionally the robot arm was placed in multiple poses to optimise the reachability. 

Team Applied Robotics to compete in Amazon Picking Challenge

Team Applied Robotics officially qualified to compete in the Amazon Picking Challenge at ICRA 2015. The challenge is to build a robotic application that is able to pick up randomly placed items from a shelf. Although this is a simple task for a human, it is still a huge challenge to automate. Amazon hopes to spur the advancements of the technologies that will enable an economically viable generic order picking solution.

Team Applied Robotics will be working on:

• Development of a compliant gripper
• Object recognition
• Path planning
• Task coordination

You will be able to follow our progress on this blog

You can check out our qualification video on Youtube