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.