UnfoldIR: Tactile Robotic Unfolding of Cloth

Robotic unfolding of cloth is challenging due to the wide range of textile materials and their ability to deform in unpredictable ways. Previous work has focused almost exclusively on visual feedback to solve this task. We present UnfoldIR (“unfolder”), a dual-arm robotic system relying on infrared (IR) tactile sensing and cloth manipulation heuristics to achieve in-air unfolding of randomly crumpled rectangular textiles by means of edge tracing. The system achieves
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85% coverage on multiple textiles of different sizes and textures. After unfolding, at least three corners are visible in 83.3 up to 94.7% of cases. Given these strong “tactile-only” results, we argue that the fusion of both tactile and visual sensing can bring cloth unfolding to a new level of performance.