Bimanual robotic cloth manipulation for laundry folding

Christian Bersch, Benjamin Pitzer, Soren Kammel
2011 2011 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems  
The physical properties of highly deformable objects such as clothing poses a challenging problem for autonomously acting systems. Especially, grasping and manipulation require new approaches that can accommodate for an object's variable and changing appearance. In this paper, we present a system that is capable of fully autonomously transforming a clothing item from a random crumpled configuration into a folded state. We describe a method to compute valid grasp poses on the cloth which
more » ... for deformability. Our algorithm includes a novel fold detection and grasp generation strategy, which suggests grasp poses on cloth folds. Machine learning techniques are used to evaluate these grasp poses. In our experiments, we use a stock PR2 robot whose two arms alternatingly perform grasps on a T-shirt equipped with fiducial markers. The goal of this grasp sequence is to bring the T-shirt into a configuration from which the robot can fold it. In several experiments, we demonstrate the performance of our approach.
doi:10.1109/iros.2011.6095109 dblp:conf/iros/BerschPK11 fatcat:fmiv5luzhnexdcisxcdl7der7i