Amazon Picking Challenge 2015

At the Amazon Picking Challenge, 26 teams competed on their ability to pick items out of warehouse shelves. While the first year was largely focused on basic competencies, there are clear ways AI techniques can help make these systems more capable and robust. The APC follows in the footsteps of other robotics competitions, most notably RoboCup and the DARPA challenges, by posing a real-world environment in which robots must perform humanlike tasks. The APC's focus is on one core -- but extremely important -- area of robotic competency: manipulating objects in the world. The competition scenario was a Kivalike warehouse in which the robot had 20 minutes to pick items off a shelf and put them into a plastic tote.