Amazon.com’s warehouse robotics division, based in North Reading has organized a competition.

Brian Benoit, a senior manager at Boston-based Rethink Robotics, which is supplying dual-armed manufacturing robots to many of the 31 teams competing in the challenge, said that he visited two teams participating in the competition, on Tuesday.

The teams were designing the hardware and writing software for taking a fictional customer order, find the items on a shelving unit, grab them, and put them into a box without damaging them. In the competition the best robot will win $20,000 this week at the inaugural Amazon Picking Challenge in Seattle.

Benoit said that the Amazon challenge was a big deal in the ‘small world of robotics research.
He mentioned that besides him the professors whom he visited at MIT and WPI also saw the challenge the same way a pole vaulter sees the Olympics.

Alberto Rodriguez, an assistant professor at MIT, called it an Amazon-sponsored ‘brainstorming session’ in order to get lots of smart people who would think about how to build more capable robots.

Furthermore, this task was not-so-veiled threat to the thousands of hourly workers who do these tasks in Amazon warehouses around the world.

In April, Amazon mentioned that it had around 50,000 employees working in what it called ‘fulfillment centers’. The figure excluded the 80,000 seasonal workers who last year filled orders in the run-up to the holidays.

According to the career site Glassdoor, Amazon pays full-time warehouse workers about $26,000 per year.

Kiva Systems, a Massachusetts robotics company, helped Amazon in introducing the first significant wave of robots to its warehouses. In 2012, Amazon paid $775 million to acquire Kiva, and in December, the company revealed that 15,000 of Kiva’s bright orange bots were already on the job.

But Kiva’s robots looked like rolling ottomans. They were designed to fetch a tall metal rack full of merchandise and move it to a ‘pick station’, whereas a person is responsible for grabbing the right items and putting them into a box. It seemed like the picking challenge is seeking to automate that second stage of filling an order.