Vision system for cloth handling robot

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, and full automation systems which can handle clothes are required. To automate these factories, 3-D vision systems are dispensable to recognize the 3-D shape of flexible clothes. There are three steps to handle clothes by robots. They are ; (1) to pick up one cloth from piled clothes, (2) to grasp one corner of a cloth, (3) to grasp one edge of a cloth. The requirements for vision systems at these steps of the cloth handling have been analyzed and the vision algorithms have been developed.