Bi-Manual Manipulation of Multi-Component Garments towards Robot-Assisted Dressing

In this paper, we propose a strategy for robot-assisted dressing with multi-component garments, such as gloves. Most studies in robot-assisted dressing usually experiment with single-component garments, such as sleeves, while multi-component tasks are often approached as sequential single-component problems. In dressing scenarios with more complex garments, robots should estimate the alignment of the human body to the manipulated garments, and revise their dressing strategy. In this paper, we focus on a glove dressing scenario and propose a decision process for selecting dressing action primitives on the different components of the garment, based on a hierarchical representation of the task and a set of environmental conditions. To complement this process, we propose a set of bi-manual control strategies, based on hybrid position, visual, and force feedback, in order to execute the dressing action primitives with the deformable object. The experimental results validate our method, enabling the Baxter robot to dress a mannequin's hand with a gardening glove.