We present our approach for robotic perception in cluttered scenes that led to winning the recent Amazon Robotics Challenge (ARC) 2017. Next to small objects with shiny and transparent surfaces, the biggest challenge of the 2017 competition was the introduction of unseen categories. In contrast to traditional approaches which require large collections of annotated data and many hours of training, the task here was to obtain a robust perception pipeline with only few minutes of data acquisition and training time. To that end, we present two strategies that we explored. One is a deep metric learning approach that works in three separate steps: semantic-agnostic boundary detection, patch classification and pixel-wise voting. The other is a fully-supervised semantic segmentation approach with efficient dataset collection. We conduct an extensive analysis of the two methods on our ARC 2017 dataset. Interestingly, only few examples of each class are sufficient to fine-tune even very deep convolutional neural networks for this specific task.

The Amazon Robotics Challenge enlisted sixteen teams to each design a pick-and-place robot for autonomous warehousing, addressing development in robotic vision and manipulation. This paper presents the design of our custom-built, cost-effective, Cartesian robot system Cartman, which won first place in the competition finals by stowing 14 (out of 16) and picking all 9 items in 27 minutes, scoring a total of 272 points. We highlight our experience-centred design methodology and key aspects of our system that contributed to our competitiveness. We believe these aspects are crucial to building robust and effective robotic systems.

Robotic challenges like the Amazon Picking Challenge (APC) or the DARPA Challenges are an established and important way to drive scientific progress. They make research comparable on a well-defined benchmark with equal test conditions for all participants. However, such challenge events occur only occasionally, are limited to a small number of contestants, and the test conditions are very difficult to replicate after the main event. We present a new physical benchmark challenge for robotic picking: the ACRV Picking Benchmark. Designed to be reproducible, it consists of a set of 42 common objects, a widely available shelf, and exact guidelines for object arrangement using stencils. A well-defined evaluation protocol enables the comparison of complete robotic systems - including perception and manipulation - instead of sub-systems only. Our paper also describes and reports results achieved by an open baseline system based on a Baxter robot.