The proposal and its evaluation of unified laundry folding method for robot arm

In this study, we propose and evaluate the unified laundry folding method for robot arm which can fold many kinds of laundries in the same way. The basic concept of this method is to make the laundry to square shape by using the developed some unified rules. The edges of the laundry are detected and the image of the laundry is enclosed in a rectangle by image processing, then the folding line to fold the protruding part inside of the laundry is defined for making the laundry square. We confirmed that the proposed unified laundry folding method can deal with T-shirt, pants and towels in the same way. And, we evaluated the proposed unified method by comparing with the human's laundry folding method. As a result, we confirmed that our proposed unified method and the human's folding method are similar and the proposed method will be useful for robot arm laundry folding task.