Hanging a T-Shirt: A Step Towards Deformable Peg-in-Hole Manipulation with Multimodal Tactile Feedback

Peg-in-hole manipulation has been a long-standing problem in robotics due to its broad application in both domestic and industrial domains. Due to advances in perception and modeling, deformable object manipulation is attracting increasing attention. This paper focuses on the intersection of these problems, where a hole must be deformed to allow peg entry. A common domestic application of this task is to pass a clothes hanger through a T-shirt's neckline to hang it. We demonstrate that the complexity of the problem can be reduced by using multimodal tactile feedback from a GelSight sensor. High-resolution contact detection helps to localize grasp to suitable locations on the T-shirt. Using tactile feedback to track a force trajectory, our algorithm can manipulate T-shirts of varying size and stiffness so that their neckline encloses the hanger. Our experimental results show consistency with the theoretical analysis. We anticipate that our proposed method will be more broadly applicable to other problems requiring simultaneous estimation and execution of force trajectory for elastic objects.