Team C²M: Two Cooperative Robots for Picking and Stowing in Amazon Picking Challenge 2016

Abstract

Automatization for the picking and placing of a variety of objects stored on shelves is a challenging problem for robotic picking systems in distribution warehouses. Here, object recognition using image processing is especially effective at picking and placing a variety of objects. In this study, we propose an efficient method for object recognition based on object grasping position for picking robots. We use a convolutional neural network (CNN) that can achieve highly accurate object recognition. In typical CNN methods for object recognition, objects are recognized by using an image containing picking targets from which object regions suitable for grasping can be detected. However, these methods increase the computational cost because a large number of weight filters are convoluted with the whole image. The proposed method detects all graspable positions from an image as a first step. In the next step, it classifies an optimal grasping position by feeding an image of the local region at the grasping point to the CNN. By recognizing the grasping positions of the objects first, the computational cost is reduced because of the fewer convolutions of the CNN.