Study of cloth handling system for industrial use

To automate linen supply factories completely, we have been developing the flexible objects handling robot system. The purpose of this system is to input washing clothes to the pressing and folding line which is still operated by human operators. This system mainly consists of the two multi-joint robots with flexible hands, the vision sensors with stereo cameras and a pattern projector. There are three steps to handle clothes. 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. Experimental result shows that our system has ability to handle a cloth.