Amazon crowns winner of first warehouse robot challenge

http://www.engadget.com/2015/06/01/amazon-picking-challenge-winner/

by oillio • 11 years ago

91 51 11 years ago

There's nothing like giving away something for tens of thousands of dollars that they could have sold for tens of billions.

IanCal5• 11 years ago

Does amazon now own the IP? If not, then this sounds like a great idea, giving away highly useful ideas for everyone to use.

jessaustin2• 11 years ago

I don't think parent was referring to Amazon as having given anything away. Still, if you're not in a position to use this sort of tech, "tens of billions" is probably an exaggeration.

melling2• 11 years ago

Can you skip the snarky comment and explain why this kind of contest is bad? To me it seems like a great idea for everyone. The contestants:

1. Can win money

2. Gain exposure

3. Network with other contestants

4. Potentially get more funding

mfringel• 11 years ago

The general problem with doing gigs "for exposure" is that it typically only gets you other gigs "for exposure".

saosebastiao5• 11 years ago

If you could teleport packages to my front porch, would you be willing to give that to Amazon in exchange for $25k and "exposure"? Amazon becomes the first trillion dollar company in history and you get your name on a press release and some snack money. I would never want any sort of exposure that told people that I'm easily duped about the value of my brain.

lumberjack• 11 years ago

I generally agree with this sentiment but it's important to note that they don't know beforehand whether their technology is worth anything or not.

In a way, entering such contests is a way of lower risk in exchange for more modest rewards.

If they wanted to setup a startup instead it would have taken them ages to get the same kind of recognition this contest immediately gives them.

Animats• 11 years ago

That's a nice bin-picking system. Bin-picking is a classic robotic manipulation problem [1], and they're doing a good job. They target the object and approach it from an angle where pickup is possible. The unusual thing here is the range of objects picked. Most bin-picking has a far narrower range.

It's a vacuum picker, which is limited; they couldn't pick up a perforated metal pencil holder. But over 90% of the items tested were vacuum-pickable. That's probably a reasonable figure for Amazon's inventory, since books are vacuum-pickable. Amazon can sort their inventory into machine-pickable and non-machine pickable.

The new system is really slow, but that can be fixed.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wh2GRA9enN4

ChuckMcM2• 11 years ago

While the pick up tool did use a vacuum pump are you sure it is using that for suction? It actually looked like the end effector was something along the lines of the 'coffee grounds' pick up tool. See (http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/2010/10/researchers-deve...)

If it is that sort of gripper then it could pick up the perforated boxes just as easily.

knodi1232• 11 years ago

the article explicitly stated that the perforated metal mesh could not be gripped by their vacuum effector

peteretep2• 11 years ago

    > since books are vacuum-pickable

Really? I'd have thought they were one of a class that weren't. If you latch on to the outer cover, you'll splay the book, which can damage hard backs.

Raphael• 11 years ago

Perhaps all the books are shrink-wrapped to hold them shut.

ck22• 11 years ago

How can self-driving cars handle going down the road at 70mph, yet bin-picker robots have to move so slowly to be accurate?

Seems like a contradiction to me.

saosebastiao5• 11 years ago

It comes down to path planning degrees of freedom and dimensionality. Cars have two degrees of freedom and two dimensions, where most of these robots use 6 degrees of freedom in 3 dimensions.

ck22• 11 years ago

Could it be accelerated with massive amounts of computing power?

Is the limitation here sensor speed or computing speed?

Certainly not motor speed, I see once the robot determines what to do, it immediately moves much more quickly.

genericuser2• 11 years ago

Well just off the top of my head bin-pickers probably need to have millimeter accuracy when grabbing something so as to get close enough to suction it and not stab through it. Cars on the other hand are not functioning at that level of precision when traveling 70 mph, they are probably not even using that level of precision when parking, and they do not park at 70 mph.

Igglyboo• 11 years ago

A bin-picker robot needs to be accurate on the scale of a few millimeters while a car is probably fine with a few hundred centimeters of accuracy.

robotresearcher4• 11 years ago

Think about that again. A few meters of accuracy is not going to drive down a lane safely, let alone park, negotiate an intersection, or pass a cyclist in traffic. A handful of centimeters, not a few hundred.

johansch• 11 years ago

Perhaps sub-par mechanics is a factor. When building some robot arms I've discovered it's relatively hard to combine speed, precision and power.

Here's a demo of speed and accuracy using standard industrial robots:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cR-YlZ9NdIA

ChuckMcM2• 11 years ago

They don't. It is a convergence problem. If you've ever seen a pick-and-place robot in a factor you know they can be quite fast.

Simply put, the convergence problem is getting to the correct orientation and position to positively pick up an item. Factory robots finesse that by putting parts in a narrow area in the work space but modern car assembly robots can pull parts in a wide variety of orientations and positions.

Current research has focused on visual systems as it is pretty cheap these days to put a couple of cameras near the end effector to provide a stereoscopic view to the effector converging on the target.

nulltype2• 11 years ago

Here's a pretty sweet pick and place robot for reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzHpDDttIBU

noonespecial• 11 years ago

When you're playing golf, why don't you use your 3 wood on the green?

michaelt• 11 years ago

In robotics, a lot of speed problems can be solved by spending more money on a bigger arm with better acceleration and backlash characteristics, reducing vibration by bolting it down to a stronger bit of floor, making your vision system less blurry by adding more and brighter lighting, avoiding people hitting their heads with a proper guarding system, and possibly throwing more CPU at your processing problem.

These issues are all eminently solvable, but the solutions take time and make the system harder to work on and more expensive, without generating a contribution to knowledge or academic papers.

Better to have a slow system you can transport to demonstrations than a fast system bolted to a lab floor that you can't demo anywhere :)

thedogeye• 11 years ago

Congrats to Team RBO!

And whatever is the antonym of congrats to Amazon's warehouse workers!

raverbashing• 11 years ago

Based on stories about those positions, even though they'll lose their job, hopefully they'll have a better position.

Amazon warehouse positions have high attrition and turnaround

nulltype2• 11 years ago

Sure the robots can pick items out of bins, but can they wait in a 30 minute long security screening line at the end of their shift?

MCRed• 11 years ago

It's not just warehouse, it's engineering. Amazon as a company treats employees (outside of the executive suite) like dirt. IT's a retailer, more like Walmart than Microsoft, and so they have no respect for engineering. The only reason AWS happened was Vogels had enough power to isolate his people from the rest of Amazon (though I bet that team is suffering now too.)

My boss was trained to be a prison guard and couldn't operate spreadsheets, after a re-org, his boss was, I kid you not, one of those DMV ladies who has no interest in doing anything but covering her butt. (I mean, literally worked at the DMV and then got a job at Amazon managing dozens of engineers.)

They like to say things like "only hire A players" but their entire management is D players. It's hard to get a job as an engineer there but as an engineering manager all you need is a college degree in basket weaving and a demonstrated ability to kiss ass.

knodi1232• 11 years ago

it's "condolences"

sogen• 11 years ago

say no to spec work

joars• 11 years ago

Cool, it would probably be less complex if the items were at one place all the time, like with a robotic warehouse: https://youtu.be/6EmR0KHBj_M?t=1m

peteretep2• 11 years ago

I have built an automated warehouse very similar to the one in the video; you get different items in the same totes - any other approach is simply not feasible from a space perspective.

matthewrhoden1• 11 years ago

I wonder if it would be better to have a smart bin that would simply push products down a slide to a conveyor belt instead.

harmarsupercar• 11 years ago

Yes, it does seem like they're using a robot to solve a human problem. If the robots were the ones who decided how the shelves were initially stacked then surely there would be more elegant approaches to this? picking and packing is a tiny part of the whole ordering and delivery system which would probably be best re-designed from the top down if all parts are to be conducted automatically.

That said, I'm all for businesses encouraging research to be done in this area. Automation will swallow us all eventually, but it's going to take a while yet...

Amazon crowns winner of first warehouse robot challenge

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