Amazon Picking Challenge @ ICRA 2015

Amazon Picking Challenge @ ICRA 2015

Greetings colleagues! We are excited to announce a new manipulation contest to be held at ICRA in May 2015 (http://icra2015.org) in Seattle, WA, USA.

This may be of particular interest to the ROS community since we are encouraging researchers to push their new developments into the open-source domain (as a requirement to be eligible for the available travel support and contest prizes). We hope this leads to the contribution of new and interesting work within ROS.

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Amazon is able to quickly package and ship millions of items to customers from a network of fulfillment centers all over the globe. This wouldn't be possible without leveraging cutting-edge advances in technology. Amazon's automated warehouses are successful at removing much of the walking and searching for items within a warehouse. However, commercially viable automated picking in unstructured environments still remains a difficult challenge. In order to spur the advancement of this fundamental technology we are excited to be organizing the first Amazon Picking Challenge at ICRA 2015. It is our goal to strengthen the ties between the industrial and academic robotic communities and promote shared and open solutions to some of the big problems in unstructured automation. To this end the contest will be awarding travel grants to ICRA 2015, practice equipment, and a large prize pool for the competition winners.

This competition will challenge entrants to build their own robot hardware and software that can attempt simplified versions of the general task of picking items from shelves. The robots will be presented with a stationary lightly populated inventory shelf and be asked to pick a subset of the products and put them on a table. The challenge combines object recognition, pose recognition, grasp planning, compliant manipulation, motion planning, task planning, task execution, and error detection and recovery. The robots will be scored by how many items are picked in a fixed amount of time, with $26,000 in prizes being awarded. Participants will be encouraged to share and disseminate their approach to improve future challenge results and industrial implementations.

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Find out more and sign up for email updates at the challenge website:

Or email us at:

committee@amazonpickingchallenge.org