Abstract-Robotic manipulation of deformable objects remains a challenging task. One such task is folding a garment autonomously. Given start and end folding positions, what is an optimal trajectory to move the robotic arm to fold a garment? Certain trajectories will cause the garment to move, creating wrinkles, and gaps, other trajectories will fail altogether. We present a novel solution to find an optimal trajectory that avoids such problematic scenarios. The trajectory is optimized by minimizing a quadratic objective function in an off-line simulator, which includes material properties of the garment and frictional force on the table. The function measures the dissimilarity between a user folded shape and the folded garment in simulation, which is then used as an error measurement to create an optimal trajectory. We demonstrate that our two-arm robot can follow the optimized trajectories, achieving accurate and efficient manipulations of deformable objects.

Figure 1: Wire mesh design allows creating physical realizations (1 st and 5 th images) of a given design surface (2 nd and 4 th images) composed of interwoven material (middle image) in an interactive, optimization-supported design process. Both the torso and the Igea face are constructed from a single sheet of regular wire mesh. AbstractWe present a computational approach for designing wire meshes, i.e., freeform surfaces composed of woven wires arranged in a regular grid. To facilitate shape exploration, we map material properties of wire meshes to the geometric model of Chebyshev nets. This abstraction is exploited to build an efficient optimization scheme. While the theory of Chebyshev nets suggests a highly constrained design space, we show that allowing controlled deviations from the underlying surface provides a rich shape space for design exploration. Our algorithm balances globally coupled material constraints with aesthetic and geometric design objectives that can be specified by the user in an interactive design session. In addition to sculptural art, wire meshes represent an innovative medium for industrial applications including composite materials and architectural façades. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach using a variety of digital and physical prototypes with a level of shape complexity unobtainable using previous methods.

Abstract-Deformable objects such as garments are highly unstructured, making them difficult to recognize and manipulate. In this paper, we propose a novel method to teach a twoarm robot to efficiently track the states of a garment from an unknown state to a known state by iterative regrasping. The problem is formulated as a constrained weighted evaluation metric for evaluating the two desired grasping points during regrasping, which can also be used for a convergence criterion The result is then adopted as an estimation to initialize a regrasping, which is then considered as a new state for evaluation. The process stops when the predicted thin shell conclusively agrees with reconstruction. We show experimental results for regrasping a number of different garments including sweater, knitwear, pants, and leggings, etc.

Realistic rendering of participating media is one of the major subjects in computer graphics. Monte Carlo techniques are widely used for realistic rendering because they provide unbiased solutions, which converge to exact solutions. Methods based on Monte Carlo techniques generate a number of light paths, each of which consists of a set of randomly selected scattering events. Finding a new scattering event requires free path sampling to determine the distance from the previous scattering event, and is usually a timeconsuming process for inhomogeneous participating media. To address this problem, we propose an adaptive and unbiased sampling technique using kd-tree based space partitioning. A key contribution of our method is an automatic scheme that partitions the spatial domain into sub-spaces (partitions) based on a cost model that evaluates the expected sampling cost. The magnitude of performance gain obtained by our method becomes larger for more inhomogeneous media, and rises to two orders compared to traditional free path sampling techniques.

We consider the simulation of dense foams composed of microscopic bubbles, such as shaving cream and whipped cream. We represent foam not as a collection of discrete bubbles, but instead as a continuum. We employ the Material Point Method (MPM) to discretize a hyperelastic constitutive relation augmented with the Herschel-Bulkley model of non-Newtonian viscoplastic flow, which is known to closely approximate foam behavior. Since large shearing flows in foam can produce poor distributions of material points, a typical MPM implementation can produce non-physical internal holes in the continuum. To address these artifacts, we introduce a particle resampling method for MPM. In addition, we introduce an explicit tearing model to prevent regions from shearing into artificially-thin, honey-like threads. We evaluate our method's efficacy by simulating a number of dense foams, and we validate our method by comparing to real-world footage of foam.