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Businesses Robotics

Amazon Robot Picking Challenge 2015 106

Posted by samzenpus from the better-picking dept.
mikejuk writes The Amazon Picking Challenge at ICRA (IEEE Robotics and Automation) 2015 is about getting a robot to perform the picking task. All the robot has to do is pick a list of items from the automated shelves that Amazon uses and place the items into another automated tray ready for delivery. The prizes are $20,000 for the winner, $5000 for second place and $1000 for third place. In addition each team can be awarded up to $6000 to get them and their robot to the conference so that they can participate in the challenge. Amazon is even offering to try to act as matchmaker between robot companies and teams not having the robot hardware they need. A Baxter Research Robot will be made available at the contest.
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Amazon Robot Picking Challenge 2015 More

Amazon Robot Picking Challenge 2015

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  • Pay me once, shame on me. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Immerman ( 2627577 ) on Thursday October 09, 2014 @09:08PM (#48108385)

    So basically they're paying the winners less than one year's salary for a picker, in order to develop a technology that will permanently replace virtually every picker in all their warehouses. I see how this is a good deal for Amazon, not so much how it's fair for the competitors or good for the human race.

    • It might be worth it if you can enter with absolutely no loss of patents or copyrights, or grants of license to Amazon, for anything related to the robot you enter; but only if you were already working on the problem for reasons related to an amount of money that ranks somewhere between 'insulting' and 'hilarious' in comparison to the value of the task. $20k would likely have some difficultly covering even your expenses, much less actually rewarding you, and that's the big prize.

      • It might be worth it if you can enter with absolutely no loss of patents or copyrights, or grants of license to Amazon, for anything related to the robot you enter; but only if you were already working on the problem for reasons related to an amount of money that ranks somewhere between 'insulting' and 'hilarious' in comparison to the value of the task. $20k would likely have some difficultly covering even your expenses, much less actually rewarding you, and that's the big prize.

        Nonsense, it is easily worth it just if you think you can build a robot that can complete the task.

        The design would be worth billions, if you add in a bunch of investment money. (which would flow to a contest winner) And the $20k easily pays back the materials cost of a garage/makerspace-built prototype.

        I agree if you're not already thinking about robotics and interested in working on it then it would be a bad idea to enter. But that is true of any technical contest. But you don't need to already be working

        • Would a card board box, with a midget inside qualify as a robot ?

          No batteries needed!

        • The design would be worth billions, if you add in a bunch of investment money. (which would flow to a contest winner) And the $20k easily pays back the materials cost of a garage/makerspace-built prototype.

          That's why I included the bit about "absolutely no loss of patents or copyrights, or grants of license to amazon, for anything related to the robot." bit.

          The value of something that is good enough to win the prize is far larger than the prize. If you can compete without compromising your control of your entry in any way, it only costs the time of whoever you send to unpack the robot and participate. If touching the contest involves granting any right to your entry, you should probably run away screaming.

          • Probably why contests aren't give-aways in the first place, and while people should read the fine print first to make sure, it is not a realistic concern.

          • I am have released documents and designs for quite a few technologies in the past. This is a topic which has always interested me, though I simply am not interested in building a business making these robots. Have drawings for multiple designs that when used in conjunction can handle most picking related issues. I will not likely enter this competition. The cost of entering is too high and has too big of a risk walking away without my expenses covered.

            I think $100,000 first prize, $50,000 second and $20,00

            • The cost of entering is too high

              What cost? If you don't already have a robot that can do this task, or can do it without major modification, you don't enter.

              and has too big of a risk walking away without my expenses covered.

              Amazon is offering some teams money to cover their transport costs, so that may help some potential applicants participate.

            • The cost of entering is too high and has too big of a risk walking away without my expenses covered.

              Indeed, go big or go home. Impressing the likes of Amazon would mean millions of dollars in contracts (even just for the IP surrounding advanced robotic processes) so if the reward isn't big enough to counter the risk (i.e. you think you won't do well) then by all means move along.

              Given the increasing visibility of the negative externalities of human pickers at Amazon's third party fulfillment locations, they are going to be increasingly eager to do anything they can to reduce the number of humans involved

        • Wait till the full rules and the Terms and Conditions are made available. I would bet that somewhere there will be a clause that says that people who enter sign over any rights they might claim on the design of their robot and Amazon gets to patent anything to do with it that can be patented... in exchange for a prize. Companies like Amazon don't do shit like this based on the goodness of their hearts.

          • Your user ID gives you no excuse to have never read the rules of a technical contest before. That is never the case.

            • My uid is low-ish, my age is middle-ish, and my cynicism is high. I always read the fine print.

              • I always read the fine print.

                Except that by that claim, you're admitting to having never even looked at a contest closely enough to read the rules. How much of a nerd are you if you never even had enough of a contest-fantasy to read the website about a contest? That's pretty weak sauce, even for a cynic.

                • The rules weren't posted when I made my comment. Announcing prize money is not the same as posting rules terms and conditions. If YOU had bothered to look you would have seen that. And I had to go through numerous pages before I found the one that said 'rules will be posted in mid October.' I am cynical especially when something is hyped but no conditions place around it.

          • Companies like Amazon don't do shit like this based on the goodness of their hearts.

            It's not the goodness of their heart. They are doing it because they want people to focus on a problem that they want to solve.
            My guess is that the reason the prize money is so low is because the problem has been simplified and they don't expect a
            perfect commercial ready solution. I would also guess that if you managed to solve it well enough to impress amazon then
            they would offer you considerably more than the 20k and try to buy you out and/or hire you.
            They are looking for original ideas and/or new emplo

        • Amazon will likely have a team to "pick" the winner and there will be a lawyer on the team whose job it is to make sure Amazon ends up holding the patents.

      • Participants will be encouraged to share and disseminate their approach to improve future challenge results and industrial implementations.

        That doesn't sound to demanding to me. Acquiring a patent requires that you do this anyways.

        The prizes are actually $20,000 for the winner, $5000 for second place and $1000 for third place. In addition each team can be awarded up to $6000 to get them and their robot to the conference so that they can participate in the challenge.

        So, there is some coverage for expen

      • It's not about the prize money. It's about the recognition and implied chance for a future contract with Amazon, which could be worth several orders of magnitude more.

    • Re:Pay me once, shame on me. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by JBMcB ( 73720 ) on Thursday October 09, 2014 @09:23PM (#48108435)

      I'm sure you had your secretary type out your message for you. Or are you using a job-destroying computer?

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Robots are a good deal when it comes to grueling and repetitive tasks that are harmful to human workers.

      It's good for the human race because the jobs in the Amazon warehouses are too difficult for human workers to perform safely over long periods of time.

      • They are good when we are making use of the additional labour we are freeing up to reduce the workload on the rest of the workforce and making sure the benefits spread to all of humanity. If it's just an excuse for Amazon to fire the only people that work for them, hoover up more cash from shops (also firing workers), then skip out on paying any tax on income then I don't see it as a benefit to humanity.

        • They are good when we are making use of the additional labour we are freeing up to reduce the workload on the rest of the workforce and making sure the benefits spread to all of humanity.

          That's a second problem that needs to be solved. Finding full employment for people after all the shit jobs are eliminated is important
          but that still doesn't mean that we shouldn't be trying to eliminate all the dangerous and unhealthy jobs that we can.
          There are certain jobs (like old fashion coal mining) that you're probably better off sitting at home on welfare than you are being at
          the bottom of the coal shaft slowly dying.

          • Why full employment? Why aren't we all working half time and spending more time living our lives?

            • Why full employment? Why aren't we all working half time and spending more time living our lives?

              I agree. I think we've added more than enough labor saving devices that we should be able to start redefining
              "full employment" as less than 40 hours per week. We have a long way to go though as (at least in the USA)
              we can't even seem to get people and companies to limit their work to 40 much less something less than 40.

              • Instead they waste your time at 'work' and pay you for it.

                Scrum is a plot to kill productivity. In theory it's just a bad idea, in practice it's a horrible, moral killing opportunity for all the wrong people to 'gain some visibility' at everybodies expense. Scrum meetings are classic examples of meetings that should have been done via email or ideally via source control and project management software. Sequential one on one information exchange/interrogation. All the wrong people become scrum leaders. I

    • Re:Pay me once, shame on me. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by plover ( 150551 ) on Thursday October 09, 2014 @09:28PM (#48108459) Homepage Journal

      So basically they're paying the winners less than one year's salary for a picker, in order to develop a technology that will permanently replace virtually every picker in all their warehouses.

      I didn't understand that either. Someone with a machine vision and shelf picking system could name their price instead of settling for a measly $10K. Hell, they could lease just one of those pickers out for $10K/year each, and Amazon would snap them up as fast as they could come off the factory line; as would just about every other warehouse operation in the country.

      I'd say "nice try, Amazon", but it doesn't even seem like they're trying. This is just pathetic.

      • I'd say "nice try," but I suspect your reading comprehension is actually higher than you displayed here, but that you just did not in fact try very hard.

        And guess what, regardless of if they accept the prize from Amazon or not, they can still name their price, including to Amazon. But I doubt they'll want to lease them. They're going to prefer to buy your company, or license your design.

        • You're probably right, but that would depend very much on the terms of the competition - technology licenses buried in the tenth page of fine print on the entry forms are not unheard of.

          • The devil will be in the details, which have not yet been decided and/or published, but it won't make sense for them to make it a gimmick because this is one of those contests where the most likely result is nobody will complete the task. The real risk for the managers is that nobody finishes and they wasted the conference budget with nothing to show for it. They need at least an "almost winner."

            To have a significant chance, they need to attract entries from teams at high profile engineering schools. And so

      • This is the kind of contest that no participant who's qualified should ever compete in. It's the same kind of crap as the 'design our new logo' contests or 'shoot your own commercial (for us)' contests.

        • No one who's qualified should ever compete in these, because they're not for people who are qualified. They're for engineering students to get some hands on practical experience, and maybe come up with some novel ideas along the way.
      • So Amazon's pickers tried to force them to pay a livable wage and now Amazon wants to replace them with robots. Maybe we need to have some kind of legislation so make it so the number of people a company employs (domestically) and the average workers salary are matched up to their revenues. I say revenues, because profit is easier to manipulate. If they cross into the evil parasite quadrant then they get penalized, if they end up in the highly beneficial to society quadrant they get rewarded. Dollars and c

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Hadlock ( 143607 )

      Probably someone at Amazon said "what if we just hold a competition and see what happens?" and their boss said "yeah but how much would that cost? we have a budget, you know", response back; "yeah I guess we could put it together for $100,000 including logisitcs, leaving 25% of the project cost as an incentive price". Boss thinks on it for a minute, "hmm yeah that sounds good, send me a proposal and we'll run with it, this is the sort of thing we reinvest all our profits in to, there's no way this is a comp

      • More likely they knew they wanted to participate in the robotics conference taking place in Seattle, and they set aside a budget, and then decided to use it for a contest, and then asked what robot they wanted. And it turns out they already know what robot they wanted, because they bought the company that makes the robot-shelf-thingies that currently deliver the bins and groups of items to the human pickers. This is the last step in the process that isn't already automated.

        Given that they already bought a r

    • So basically they're paying the winners less than one year's salary for a picker, in order to develop a technology that will permanently replace virtually every picker in all their warehouses. I see how this is a good deal for Amazon, not so much how it's fair for the competitors or good for the human race.

      No.

      They're giving out a prize for making one, not buying the rights to it, or even the prototype. Participants are "encouraged" to "share their approach" and the actual rules and what that means aren't released yet. The deal is more like, win some $$ now, start a business based on that, and then sell the business to Amazon in 2 years for some absurd amount of money.

      And like the contest site points out, their picking task is essentially the same as taking a book off a shelf, so if somebody wins their robot w

    • The problem isn't human pickers being replaced by robot pickers. I see that as progress. The problem is if, like in most fiction/movies/anime about a robotic future, the robots would wind up being controlled by a few gigacorporations or some central administration akin to the military. If every Joe or Jane can own his or her own private robot, great. However, news like this has me worried whether the dystopian future will be a technological divide between those who have robots and those who don't.

      • like in most fiction/movies/anime about a robotic future, the robots would wind up being controlled by a few gigacorporations

        It will probably be the same giga-corps that prevented common people from owning cars, TVs, computers, and smartphones.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Rich0 ( 548339 )

          like in most fiction/movies/anime about a robotic future, the robots would wind up being controlled by a few gigacorporations

          It will probably be the same giga-corps that prevented common people from owning cars, TVs, computers, and smartphones.

          That sounds like "No American has been killed by Ebola in the latest outbreak so far, so no American can ever be killed by Ebola in the latest outbreak."

          You can't buy any of the things you mentioned without having money, and the main way that people earn money is via jobs. Actually, that is rather mistatated. The way most money is earned is from investments, but the way that most people earn money is from jobs (since most of the money earning actually involves fairly few of the people). Robots are just o

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Jeremi ( 14640 )

      I see how this is a good deal for Amazon, not so much how it's fair for the competitors or good for the human race.

      Dunno about whether it's fair to the competitors or not, but having robots do pick-and-place is good for the human race -- pick-and-place is a terrible job for a human to have to do. 8+ hours of RSI-inducing mindless tedium every day? No thanks. Let the robots do it and have the humans do something meaningful.

    • So basically they're paying the winners less than one year's salary for a picker,...

      We shouldn't be sentimental about crappy jobs vanishing. It's the way we go and there's no stopping the train. The main question here is how we will transition into a society where entertainment is there to keep the masses sedated and to convince them to consume stuff (like entertainment.)

      I'd shed another light. They're paying way less that what it would cost themselves to develop. Picking an item is actually pretty hard. Will they find "one of us" willing to put in the hours and willing to forfeit his I

    • So basically they're paying the winners less than one year's salary for a picker, in order to develop a technology that will permanently replace virtually every picker in all their warehouses. I see how this is a good deal for Amazon, not so much how it's fair for the competitors or good for the human race.

      It doesn't mention anything about intellectual property, patents, etc except this bland remark: "Participants will be encouraged to share and disseminate their approach to improve future challenge results and industrial implementations."

      So, it is doubtful that entry into the contest or acceptance of the prize would compromise intellectual property (trade secrets, patents, copyrights, etc) of the creators. Much as the X prize, Grand Challenge, etc did not require contestants or winners to forfeit any IP. F

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      They are paying peanuts. It is a disgrace. You get about 50 consulting hours and maybe up to 100 engineering or scientist hours for the first price. They are basically hoping people will stupidly self-exploit to further Amazon's goal to get rid of its warehousemen that always demand reasonable pay and working conditions.

  • It seems like a simple search through pictures of every item stocked and the way to grab it is sufficient to accomplish this, and that's well within the capabilities of existing industrial robots. Put Baxter on a line navigating robot and you're there. What am I missing?

    • It seems like a simple search through pictures of every item stocked and the way to grab it is sufficient to accomplish this, and that's well within the capabilities of existing industrial robots. Put Baxter on a line navigating robot and you're there. What am I missing?

      For example, now you've identified the position of the item, but it is a plastic bag with a metal grommet on the top, hanging in a row from a metal rod. (as seen in stores) Now what?

      Getting there isn't the hard part, it is all the stuff you do once you're there.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      You are missing that for $20'000 you cannot actually get a modern industrial robot, much less write any software for it.

  • The Discussion among amazon executives (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    BigCheeze: "Next project, fully automating our warehouses this is a big task lets allocate a million billion dollars to it"
    High Level Underling: "I bet you $100 i can do it for under $50,000 all in"
    BigCheeze: "You're on!"

    which brings us up to the present.

  • What about the 2020-2040 welfare settings and if the GOP get there way even the welfare dormitories aka prisons may force people to brake laws just to get in to them. As they will not give that out for free.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Your comment may have sounded coherent in your mind, but I assure you it was the drugs talking.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by lgw ( 121541 )

      Ow, my brain! Please, oh please, could someone replace this account with a posting robot?

  • Amazon you cheap ass bastards!!! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by cheekyboy ( 598084 ) on Thursday October 09, 2014 @09:59PM (#48108595) Homepage Journal

    Go hire a team engineers and pay the $1m it takes to develop it.

    Dont give away shit money.

    $6k barely covers startup costs hardware.

    This solution will save you millions and you wanna pay $6000?

    Thats just the CEOs lunch!

    • Go hire a team engineers and pay the $1m it takes to develop it.

      What? The $1M won't even cover hiring the team of engineers, especially when you consider all the ancillary costs of doing business.

    • Easily.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by nleven ( 1848188 )
      What makes you think they are not developing it themselves. They did buy Kiva for $775m.. It's a reasonable goal to automate the picker as the next step. The purpose of such competition is to kindle interest, not to buy an already available solution. And to be reasonable, the winner is likely to be a partial solution at best.

  • Laugh (Score:1)

    by koan ( 80826 )

    Help Amazon replace people.

  • Entrants must design a robot than can autonomously navigate to Amazon's vast cash mountain, located somewhere in Luxembourg, and seize the hundreds of millions they really owe in taxes.

  • Kill some more jobs.

  • Amazon paid $750 million for Kiva Systems robotics, with about 500 employees. A workable solution to the bin-picking problem would create a company with at least that much value.

    The rules say "Participants will be encouraged to share and disseminate their approach to improve future challenge results and industrial implementations." Or, "we want to steal your technology".

  • It is $20,000. They aren't looking for the be all end all. It is just to shed some light on the problem and encourage development in this area. They aren't paying 20,000 to beat what they have. It is 20K for best in show, even if it isn't astounding.

  • Any means to safe a buck and increase "profit" is being used.
    But who or which population segment is actually benefitting?
    This definitely is not for the common good, rather a small segment of individuals.
    Still trying to figure out, how many "normal" (average) people need to work to pay the income of - let's say a 10 Million income of some ?EO, let's say in the US?

  • automated shelves

    How's them work, then?

    • The shelves come to the human picker with the items for a particular order.

      http://www.kivasystems.com/sol... [kivasystems.com]

      They describe is as "Kiva is the ultimate goods-to-man (goods-to-person) automation system."

      Now they want to replace the word "man" or "person" with "robot".

      The next step from there is to automate stocking of the shelves (I'm would bet the shelves come to the loading area when there are items available to resupply them).

  • Though this would take up more space in the warehouse, would it be faster to unpack each crate / box of items into a vending machine style dispenser?

    The actual "picking" of each order could then be automated, with the manual manipulation of products happening in larger batches.

  • If you don't want to be replaced by a robot, don't act like a robot. All jobs that can be replaced by a robot, will be replaced, eventually.

  • About 23 years ago, I participated in a robot challenge for kids to build a mars robot. It was a lot of fun, and nobody was saying "but this could replace jobs that humans do". This project will produce robots specifically designed to replace low-paid workers. Why not have a competition for robots that builds hospitals in areas that are affected by plague? Or deep-sea exploration?

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