Amazon moves one step closer toward army of warehouse robots
Amazon moves one step closer toward army of warehouse
robots
Robotics competition prize for best warehouse-working
‘picker’ machine awarded to robot designed by Dutch team
Kiva robots transport goods at an Amazon Fulfillment
Center, ahead of the Christmas rush, in Tracy, California in 2014. Photograph:
Noah Berger/Reuters
By Sam Thielman in New York
Tuesday 5 July 2016 15.15 EDT Last modified on Tuesday 5
July 2016 18.27 EDT
Amazon’s progress toward an army of helpful robots is one
step closer: a prize for the best warehouse-working “picker” machine has gone
to a robot designed by a team from TU Delft Robotics Institute and Delft
Robotics, both based in the Netherlands.
The competition was held in conjunction with Germany’s
Robocup in Leipzig. Announced on Monday, the winners took home $25,000, while
the university of Bonn’s NimbRo won $10,000 for second place and Japanese firm
PFN was awarded $5,000 for third.
The contest, in Amazon’s words, “aimed to strengthen the
ties between the industrial and academic robotic communities,” and ended with
slightly fewer than half of the entrants scoring more than 20 out of 40
possible points, according to a report in TechRepublic. The technology is
advancing quickly: all of those contestants would have surpassed the highest
scorer in the previous Picking Challenge, held just three years ago.
To compete, on 29 January the robots tried to perform a
number of tasks using “books, cubic boxes, clothing, soft objects, and
irregularly shaped objects” and a box provided by Amazon. The robots had to
take items out of the box and put them on the correct shelf, and remove shelved
items and put them into the box.
Object recognition is difficult for robots. A UC Berkeley
project from six years ago was hailed as a breakthrough when the robot
developed by the university’s team was able to fold five never-before-seen
towels over the course of an hour and 40 minutes. The team produced a video
sped up 50 times for those in a hurry.
The project is close to what the US military division
Darpa asked robots to do during its Robotics Grand Challenge in Pomona,
California, in 2015. The idea of robots surpassing humans in service jobs or on
the battlefield tends to give spectators pause, but for the moment, at least,
the human factor isn’t going anywhere. The Delft team’s robot scored very high
on the list of tasks, but it still failed more than 16% of the time.
TechRepublic points out that the robots were able to
retrieve 100 items an hour, where humans are able to retrieve 400 items per
hour, and the human would be unlikely to drop 67 of those items.
Just as Darpa did last year, Amazon is downplaying the
possibility that humans will lose jobs to robots. The company already uses
robots made by Kiva – the robotics company it bought in 2012 for $775m – in 13
of its warehouses and points out that it has increased human head count since
introducing android co-workers.
One US navy officer interviewed by the Guardian at the
Darpa challenge theorized that Google’s purchase of Boston Dynamics, the firm
that solidly outperformed its rivals during those contests, would be used to
populate its server farms with robots that could maintain computers.
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