A Dual-Arm Manipulation System for Unfolding and Folding Rectangular Cloth

This paper describes a robot system that can perform several cloth manipulation tasks. Many commendable activities on deformable object manipulation are underway in the research community. One such activity is the Cloth Manipulation Track organized as part of the Robotic Grasping and Manipulation Competitions. Although limited to rectangular fabrics, the imposed tasks incorporate many of the basics of cloth manipulation and are well thought out. In order to realize these tasks, it is necessary to take into account the properties of the fabric, which can be deformed into various shapes. In this paper, we introduce our robot system that can perform corner detection, unfolding, and folding operations on rectangular fabric products of different sizes and types. We have devised an appropriate motion sequence based on our empirical knowledge of cloth deformation and adopted a feed-forward motion approach to realize these tasks. This approach was confirmed to be feasible for different types of cloth products.