IIT Kanpur made it to podium finish in Amazon Robotics Challenge 2017
Amazon Robotics Challenge is a global competition event that is held during the Robocup every year. This year the competition was held in Nagoya, Japan during 27-30 July 2017. IIT Kanpur and TCS jointly put up a team that was selected in the final event under the tag-name IITK-TCS. Sixteen international teams from various universities across the world including MIT- Princeton, Duke University, Carnegie Mellon University and Nanyang Technological University have participated in this event.
The competition had three events: Stowing, Picking and stowing-cum-picking. A customized robotic system was required to perform these tasks autonomously. The Challenge combined object recognition, pose recognition, grasp planning, compliant manipulation, motion planning, task planning, task execution, and error detection and recovery. This time IITK-TCS team had excellent performance in all three parts of the competition. In stowing IITK-TCS team robot secured 5th position while in picking, the team robot secured 3rd position. By virtue of their good performance in both stowing and picking, the team qualified for the final event of stowing cum picking event where the robot scored 170 points and the team secured 4th position.
The team was led by Prof Laxmidhar Behera from Department of Electrical Engineering. Other team members are Prof KS Venkatesh, Anima, Samrat, Ashish, Ravi Prakash, Mohit, Siddharth and Abhay.
The video links of the events
1. Stowing Event 28 July 2017 - Our position is 5th
2. Picking Event 29 July 2017 - Our Position is 3rd
