Unfolding an Item of Clothing by Using a Single Arm Robot with Assistant Instrument

Abstract

This paper describes a method of unfolding an item of clothes by a single arm robot. The unfolding motion is assumed to use a corner of a table so that a crumpled cloth is unfolded by pulled up while making contacts with the corner. Using this approach, two problems arose; entrainment problem and outward warp problem. To solve the former, we proposed an instrument to prevent entrainment. To solve the latter, we built an algorithm that recognizes a warping form of clothes by SVM. Using four kinds of clothes, we confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed method by using a real single arm robot. Our experiment resulted at a success rate from 65 percent to 85 percent.