There's nothing like giving away something for tens of thousands of dollars that they could have sold for tens of billions.
1. Can win money
2. Gain exposure
3. Network with other contestants
4. Potentially get more funding
edit: should add that not only recruiters were there. Amazon engineers including their head of robot R&D were involved and available on the floor. Nice people.
(I'm not affiliated with Amazon and I don't do picking research)
Pretty much the only one I spotted in the team list that wasn't, was mitsubishi. Unless they're really struggling these days, I don't think that exposure is an issue.
Amazon's robotics group is the Kiva Systems startup they bought for a huge amount of money a few years ago.
I was at the conference and dropped in to this event. Lots of energy and committed teams. Many/most teams did pretty badly. I heard (but couldn't confirm) that only one item was correctly picked on the first day. It's not easy.
Having been a grad student (EDIT: Hey, it turns out my research group has published at ICRA! But not while this has gone on.), I get why these events are interesting/important. However it seems like AMZ could do a little more than <1/8th of an engineer in prize money (not counting the cost of running the conference).
Amazon does in-house R&D and is precious about the IP, like most companies. Academic research needs to have flexible IP deals.
Most of the Amazon funding for this event went to supporting student travel and registrations, plus gear shipping. Details are probably confidential but think roughly an order of magnitude more than the cash prize. Shipping is expensive.
Funding challenges is smart. Some groups are doing funded research anyway, on more-or-less related things like grasping, vision, manipulation, planning, whatever. The challenge gets teams to focus on a more complete and realistic task, thus guiding the development of their general tech in Amazon's direction.
Bottom line: Amazon, the historically conservative low-margin retailer, showed up at the premier IEEE robotics research conference, brought some money and hired some grad students. Students worked hard, learned a lot. Amazon and winners got some good press. Awesome.
It's interesting how the best team was way ahead of everyone else. I'd be very interested to see what Amazon can do internally.
They are slowly raising prices. It's off topic, but I have noticed their prices are slowly rising. I saw this happen to Home Depot, and Costco. I'm not knocking Amazon, I just got too comfortable clicking away, and should have been looking around for the best price.
These research groups are building useful tools and giving the results away to the world for free. If you'd invented the teleport system, it'd be so wide-rangingly amazingly useful that I hope it'd be released openly.
Amazon is acting like a Pawn Shop owner taking advantage of the guy with the original Picasso by telling him that it was a common forgery. Nobody in their right mind should sign up for these contests, and it pains me to see intelligent people duped into it for "the exposure".
TFA was pretty clear that none of the teams at the competition had anything close to this. The winner, which was far ahead of competitors, was able to move ten of a group of twelve specially-selected objects in twenty minutes. It's quite possible that some of the competitors will eventually create what you're talking about, but it doesn't seem that they've given away their grandchildren's inheritance just yet.
Believe it or not some people enjoy the competition, the challenge of solving an interesting problem you had not previously considered, and over all advancing the technology of the world they live in far more than gaining absurd amounts of monetary wealth.
This attitude disappoints me greatly.
The team that won was the robotics research unit at the Technical University of Berlin: https://www.robotics.tu-berlin.de, second place was MIT.
I hardly think they were "duped" into competing.
These people do research. Having a specified task that multiple teams "compete" on is there just to give a good comparison of the different approaches, otherwise everyone is picking their own tasks and it's hard to see what benefits / cons each system has.
What next, complaining that researchers publish open access papers for "the exposure" rather than selling the ideas?
Edit -
Here's a list of the teams: http://amazonpickingchallenge.org/teams.shtml
In a way, entering such contests is a way of lower risk in exchange for more modest rewards.
If they wanted to setup a startup instead it would have taken them ages to get the same kind of recognition this contest immediately gives them.