2017 Amazon Robotics Competition Won by Budget Robot
This year’s Amazon Robotics competition was designed to find a machine that could identify, pick up and store item. The winners consisted of university students as part of the Australian Centre for Robotic Vision. The team built their machine without a robot arm, instead opting to do the picking from above using a sliding mechanism and walked away with an $80,000 cash prize.
"The parts for the robot were cheap by the standards of typical industrial robots and it could be built for under 30,000 Australian dollars [£18,245; $23,935] including its sensors," Prof Jonathan Roberts, robotics lab leader at Queensland University of Technology told the BBC.
"But there were many thousands of hours of team effort that went into the design, testing and programming."
Requirements of the entries included the ability to:
- Select specified products from items in a mix and place them in delivery boxes
- Remove items from a container and put them in storage
- Put all items in storage and them remove specific items and place them into boxes
The teams were provided a list of products beforehand but were not permitted to photograph them until just before the competition. Items included various shapes and weights from boxes of tissues to hand weights. Scores were based on speed and correct placement.
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