Development and Control of Robot Hand with Finger Camera for Garment Handling Tasks

Robotic automation is steadily growing in different industries around the world. However, in some industries, such as garment manufacturing, most tasks are still predominantly manual, due to the flexible nature of clothes. Garment and clothes are easily deformed when some force is applied, so it is difficult for robots to handle them while predicting their deformation. Our general research goal is to realize flexible cloth handling using robots to automate different tasks in the garment manufacturing industry. We draw inspiration from the actions that humans perform when manipulating clothes and emulate them using a robotic system. In this paper, we developed a robot hand with a camera at the finger, to obtain local information of the contact between the garment and the robot hand, in order to achieve garment handling tasks. Specifically, we focus on the pinch and slide motion that humans perform when straightening a piece of cloth. We selected a specific task to be automated and proposed three manipulation strategies to approach the garment using visual information from the finger camera that enabled the system to perform the task consistently. We carried out two validation experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods, and an application experiment where we evaluate their applicability to a specific task.