Flattening and folding of crumpled clothes using robotic arms and stereovision (2)

Abstract

This report presents the development and implementation of an algorithm to autonomously bring an initially randomly crumpled towel to a final folded state. Since a towel is a deformable object, the manipulation involved considers the effect of all motions on the rest of the cloth and hence chooses a trajectory which either minimizes the effect or benefits from such effect to bring the towel to a more suitable configuration. Further, to handle the towel more effectively, a specialized design of gripper finger is proposed. Through this sequence of steps, the towel is first unfolded and flattened from a crumpled state, and then folded and laid on the table. Specific information is taken from a stereo-camera to aid motion planning for task completion, such as highest point coordinates of the towel and the coordinates of visible corners. The proposed method is independent of robot arm, camera and towel and can be replicated with other hardware as well. Most current methods require two or more simultaneous grasp points whereas the proposed method is successfully implemented with using a single robot arm for the first time.