Written by Simone Ziggiotto, the 4.7.15
About 25 teams will compete in the upcoming competition for Amazon robot , which will test the limits of how an intelligent machine can see, and withdraw packed in a cardboard box.
The e-commerce giant has recently awarded travel grants to 25 finalists of the Amazon Picking Challenge that will fly to Seattle in May to compete in the race and win the ultimate prize of 25 thousand dollars. Amazon has set itself the goal of reinventing the management of its stores, the ones from which every day are shipped millions of goods purchased online. Among the 25 finalists are also Two Italian teams : the team of the Politecnico di Torino and the team at the University of Pisa.
The robots of each team will face the challenge of see, pick and pack 25 items placed on a shelf. Must accurately identify, grasp and pack items with care. The points that will generate the list of the best robots will be awarded for computer vision – the ability to distinguish a box of Oreo cookies, for example, from a box of other brand – and dexterity. The fall of or damage to an item will result in penalty points.
The winner will be awarded with 25 thousand dollars in cash . The purpose of the competition is to stimulate the research community international robotics. To confirm this, all software produced by the team will become ‘open source’, and will then become available to the scientific community.
Italy is represented among the 25 finalists of the Amazon Picking Challenge from team of the Politecnico di Torino with Comau (group member Fca), which proposes a solution that “employs a robot Comau to create a ‘boom’ that moves in six dimensions and which has two ‘hands’, one of the which have not yet been seen on the market, “said one of the researchers of the Polytechnic ANSA, Manuel Del Verme. The team includes also Simone Baratta, Giorgio Tuscany, Manuel Del Verme for Politecnico di Torino and Valentina Ferrara, Ivan and Andrea Lazzero Bisson for Comau.
The second project is realized by the Italian finalist Research Center “E. Piaggio” University of Pisa and the ‘ Italian Institute of Technology . “Our strength lies in the hand of our robot, which has all the degrees of freedom of a human hand and a single motor that moves all phalanges allowing it to adapt to very different objects,” said Manolo Garabini ANSA, researcher of the University of Tuscany.
The robots already play a vital role in the packing centers of Amazon, carrying 700 pounds of shelves in and out of the stores, but now the challenge is in the management of individual objects. Amazon says it hopes the contest will “strengthen the ties between the community of academic and industrial robotics and promote shared solutions and open”.
Part of the way that Amazon is keeping up with the times are the new Kiva robots, operating for over a year in the warehouses of Amazon in the US. There are 15,000 Kiva robots scattered in all 10 stores of Amazon, which has more than 50 plants in the United States. The robots allow the company to provide millions of items to customers more quickly. Last year, the Amazon.com customers have ordered more than 36.8 million items worldwide, amounting to 426 orders per second, according to statistics from Amazon. In practice, the employee ‘human’ sends a pulse to the robot by telling which shelf has to be taken the product, then the robot is directed at the shelf in question, is positioned exactly below it, raises it from the ground by a few centimeters and transports it to the side of the employee who has to pick up the item. At this point the employee, remaining at his post, is not nothing but pick up the item, and return the robot to reposition the shelf where it was before.
With the new technologies, the robots will be able to represent to ourselves the individual product to pack and ship.
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