Fabric Manipulation by Pulling-Driven Soft Hand with Closing-Approaching Coupling

This paper proposes a pulling-driven soft hand for fabric manipulation. Automatic fabric manipulation is required in various industries such as garment industry, linen supply industry, automotive parts industry, and composite manufacturing, where various fabrics with different materials, shapes, and surface properties are used. Therefore, we propose pulling-driven soft hands to pick up various fabrics. We find that picking up a fabric on a table requires soft fingertips contacting with the fabric, large friction between fingertips and the fabric, and fingertips moving along the table to maintain the contact with the fabric. We thus introduce closing-approaching coupling to the pulling-driven soft hand. We show a prototype of the proposed soft hand to demonstrate grasping of a single fabric and picking multiple fabrics one by one from their stack. Additionally, a set of the proposed soft hands was applied to pick and place operations of several fabrics.