Amazon announces finalists for Robotics Challenge event
Amazon has announced the 16 finalists who will take part in the third-annual Amazon Robotics Challenge in Japan. The teams will gather in Nagoya on 27 July to demonstrate their latest robotics hardware and software that can pick and stow items in storage.
The Challenge combines “object recognition, pose recognition, grasp planning, compliant manipulation, motion planning, task planning, task execution, and error detection and recovery” and the robots will be scored on how many items they pick and stow in the set time. Winning teams will be awarded up to $250,000 in prizes.
“This challenge is an opportunity to strengthen the ties between the industrial and academic robotic communities and promote shared and open solutions to the technical challenges we face in unstructured automation,” said Joey Durham, Contest Chairperson and Manager of Research and Advanced Development for Amazon Robotics.
The following teams have been selected as finalists and will be competing in the 2017 Amazon Robotics Challenge:
- MC^2 – Mitsubishi, Chubu University, Chukyo University
- NAIST-Panasonic – Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Panasonic
- Team T2 – Tottori University, Toshiba
- Team K – University of Tokyo
- MIT-Princeton – Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton University
- Team Duke – Duke University
- PLAID – Carnegie Mellon University
- GMU-Negev – George Mason University, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
- ACRV – Queensland University of Technology
- IITK-TCS – Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, Tata Consultancy Services
- TKU M-Bot – Tamkang University
- Nanyang – Nanyang Technological University
- NimbRo Picking – University of Bonn
- UJI RobInLab – Jaume I University
- Applied Robotics – Smart Robotics, University of Sydney
- IFL PiRo – Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Helmut Schmidt University
The Amazon Robotics Challenge will be held during the “RoboCup” technology expo.
The 2016 contest was held at RoboCup in Leipzig, Germany, and was won by team Delft, a collaboration between Delft Robotics and TU Delft’s Robotics Institute. Carlos Hernandez Corbato, Team Delft Captain and Postdoctoral Researcher, said that entering – and winning – the challenge was a rewarding experience: “As a result of this contest, we are attracting more interest than ever before from robot manufacturers approaching us to pursue additional research.”
