A Dual-Armed Manipulation System for Unfolding and Folding Rectangular Clothes

Abstract

This paper describes a robot system capable of unfolding and folding manipulations of different rectangular cloth products. Cloth, a kind of flexible object, is an object with the property of transforming into various shapes, and it is difficult to predict or estimate its state when manipulating it. Therefore, we propose a robot system consisting of a pair of serial-link manipulators and one RGBD camera, and motion sequences for the system based on empirically obtained characteristics of cloth motion. Experiments were conducted in three different situations: folding to a right-angle four-fold, and unfolding from a right-angle four-fold or from a crumpled. The results confirm that the manipulation was successful for all combinations of nine different rectangular-shaped cloths and three different situations.