Perception for the manipulation of socks

Ping Chuan Wang, Stephen Miller, Mario Fritz, Trevor Darrell, Pieter Abbeel
2011 2011 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems  
We consider the perceptual challenges inherent in the robotic manipulation of previously unseen socks, with the end goal of manipulation by a household robot for laundry. The task poses challenging problems in modeling the appearance, shape and configuration of these textile items that tend to exhibit high variability in texture, design, and style while being highly articulated objects. At the heart of our approach is a holistic model of shape and appearance that facilitates manipulation of
more » ... e delicate items-starting even from bunched up instances. We describe novel approaches to two key perceptual problems: (i) Inferring the configuration of the sock, and (ii) determining which socks should be paired together. Robust inference in our model is achieved by strong texture based classifiers that, alone, are powerful enough to solve problems such as inside-out detection. Finally, a reliable prediction of the overall configuration is achieved by combining local cues in a global model that enforces structural consistency. We perform an extensive evaluation of different feature types and classifiers and show strong performance on each subtask of our approach. Finally, we illustrate our approach with an implementation on the Willow Garage PR2-a general purpose robotic platform.
doi:10.1109/iros.2011.6095013 dblp:conf/iros/WangMFDA11 fatcat:hvorcpxkujc3lp6bv2hey3ptj4