The goal is to have a robot with sensors and cameras attached to it pick-up known objects with random poses out of a bin using a suction gripper, parallel gripper, or other kind of robot end effector.
Early work on bin picking made use of Photometric Stereo [1] in recovering the shapes of objects and to determine their orientation in space.
[2] The challenge tasked entrants with building their own robot hardware and software that could attempt simplified versions of the general task of picking and stowing items on shelves.
The robots were scored by how many items were picked and stowed in a fixed amount of time.
[3] The first Amazon Robotics challenge was won by a team from TU Berlin in 2015, [4] followed by a team from TU Delft and the Dutch company "Fizyr" in 2016.