Robotic Unfolding of Hemmed Fabric using Pinching Slip Motion

Abstract

This paper describes an unfolding motion of fabric in air using pinching slip motion. During the pinching slip motion, the weight of the fabric generates relative movement between the moving fingertips and the fabric. The moving fingertips can hook into the hem of the fabric during the unfolding motion if the appropriate shaped fingertips and the grasping force are selected. In this paper, we simulate the pressure distribution of moving fingertips during the unfolding. We make a model of the contact between a fingertip and the hem of fabric based on fluid dynamics; the contact is considered as the collision between fluid and a block.

A method of grasp point selection from an item of clothing using hem element relations

“…shape estimation method, [10] dressing-phase estimation, [3] a grasping hand shifting from one hand to the other, [11] and pinch slip motion for unfolding a fabric product. [22] In the future, we believe that these improvements and combination with each other yield a robot system performing clothing manipulation.…”

DextAIRity: Deformable Manipulation Can be a Breeze

“…For example, Ha and Song [10] propose a learning-based approach using high-speed flinging actions to unfold a severely crumpled cloth with greater efficiency than comparable quasi-static methods. However, effectively using dynamic actions often come with restrictive system requirements, such as tracking the full (dense) state of cloth [14] or using a high-speed camera and high-speed robots [1,49,36]. In many of these approaches, robots move with high acceleration using high controller gains, resulting in expensive hardware requirements and systems that pose a danger to things and people in their surroundings.…”