Cloth handling system for washing line

Flexible objects such as clothes are hard to be handled by robots. But the working conditions for laundry factories of linen supply industry are severe because of dusts, heats and steams, and full automation systems which can handle clothes are highly required. To automate these factories, two clothe handling systems have been developed. One is the system to input the washed clothes to the pressing and folding machines. The other is the system to classify the dirty clothes from hotels and hospitals according the kind of clothes, such as sheets, covers, pillow covers and others. To construct the systems, there have been developed many key technologies, such as 3-D vision systems, a towel mark recognition system, a force sensor system, a long stroke drawing robot hand and partially constrained corner pulling out mechanism, etc. In the dirty cloth classifying system, the force sensors have played important role, which analyse the pulling up force changes to classify clothes. Several experiments show that these systems have achieved required success rate of the clothe handling.