Garment perception and its folding using a dual-arm robot

The work addresses the problem of clothing perception and manipulation by a two armed industrial robot aiming at a real-time automated folding of a piece of garment spread out on a flat surface. A complete solution combining vision sensing, garment segmentation and understanding, planning of the manipulation and its real execution on a robot is proposed. A new polygonal model of a garment is introduced. Fitting the model into a segmented garment contour is used to detect garment landmark points. It is shown how folded variants of the unfolded model can be derived automatically. Universality and usefulness of the model is demonstrated by its favorable performance within the whole folding procedure which is applicable to a variety of garments categories (towel, pants, shirt, etc.) and evaluated experimentally using the two armed robot. The principal novelty with respect to the state of the art is in the new garment polygonal model and its manipulation planning algorithm which leads to the speed up by two orders of magnitude.