A Summary of Team MIT's Approach to the Amazon Picking Challenge 2015
This addresses the problem of robotic manipulation in warehouse fulfillment for roboticists, but it is incremental as it focuses on a specific competition entry.
Team MIT tackled the Amazon Picking Challenge 2015, which involved automating object picking from shelves in warehouses, and they described their design, contributions, and performance in the competition.
The Amazon Picking Challenge (APC), held alongside the International Conference on Robotics and Automation in May 2015 in Seattle, challenged roboticists from academia and industry to demonstrate fully automated solutions to the problem of picking objects from shelves in a warehouse fulfillment scenario. Packing density, object variability, speed, and reliability are the main complexities of the task. The picking challenge serves both as a motivation and an instrument to focus research efforts on a specific manipulation problem. In this document, we describe Team MIT's approach to the competition, including design considerations, contributions, and performance, and we compile the lessons learned. We also describe what we think are the main remaining challenges.