
I am helping organize the Amazon Picking Challenge at ICRA 2015 in Seattle. The challenge pushes teams to design a complete system to pick objects from a Kiva "Pod". Multiple robot companies have offered to provide hardware to participating teams at the challenge. I had organized the ICRA 2012 Sushi Challenge with the PR2 - it was clear then that there were very few mobile robots around that could take part in a mobile manipulation challenge. With the Amazon challenge, fixed manipulators have a chance to demonstrate their capabilities in a really hard manipulation task. We expect to see lots of teams using MoveIt! and ROS in the challenge! Follow along at the Amazon Picking Challenge website.