Robot system for cloth handling

Flexible objects such as clothes are hard to be handled by robots. But the working conditions for laundry factories are severe because of dusts, heats and steams. To automate these factories, the robot system with 3-D Vision systems and a flexible hand are dispensable. To handling the flexible clothes, it is required to recognize the 3-D shape of flexible clothes. To handle the clothes, a robot hand with high freedom of degree should be introduced. Here, 3-D robot vision systems with stereo cameras and a pattern projector have been developed to apply the cloth handling, and a cloth handling robot system with a flexible hand has been developed. In this paper, the experimental development of the cloth handling robot system has been introduced.