These are talented grad students doing a gig "for exposure" on Amazon's dime with Amazon recruiters in the room hungry for talent. Many other recruiters were there (including Uber - first time I've seen them at an academic robot conference).

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)

The teams were almost all Universities. This is research, not business.

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.

http://amazonpickingchallenge.org/teams.shtml