Towel-Like Object Alignment with Human-Robot Cooperation and High-Speed Robotic Manipulation

This paper describes our primary study on the robotic task of towel-like object alignment, where the deformable property of the towel-like object makes the task very challenging. We propose to realize it with a method that combines human-robot cooperation for static manipulation (grasping) and a high-speed robotic motion strategy for dynamic manipulation (aligning). First, we design the hand-arm robotic system with the twin goals of keeping human workers dominant and safe during the cooperative operation phase. Next, we describe the towel grasping and aligning motions with the developed robotic system and high-speed visual feedback. Finally, we report the primary experimental results, which show that our proposed system enables flexible grasping by interactively cooperating with human motion as well as efficient aligning via high-speed robotic motion strategy.