Abstract
In the laundry process, there are two practical methods for storing clothes including putting folded clothes into specified drawer and hanging unfolded clothes in the closet. Several papers have discussed the former by folding clothes using a complicated dual manipulator or a humanoid robot with more six degrees of freedom. This study focuses on the latter as a novel approach to the problem of unfolding and hanging clothes using a hanger and a robotic arm. The problem consists of grasping a random point and the lowest point of an article of clothing, recognizing its parts, putting it on a hanger and then unfolding it. This study attempts to design a special hanger and a simple robotic arm to manipulate several types of shirts in regular size. A designed robotic arm having three degrees of freedom is sufficient to handle a hanger with a simple mechanism. In the system, an Xtion depth sensor played a key role for both controlling such robotic arm and creating dataset for Random Forests to recognize parts of clothes.
