Picking up One of the Folded and Stacked Towels by a Single Arm Robot

Abstract

This paper describes methods for doing a manipulation of picking up the top one of towels folded and stacked on a table. In this task, It is necessary to guarantee the reproducibility of shape of the picked towel when placing it again. Also, it is necessary to carry out lifting motion without moving other remaining towels. To overcome these issues, we propose work procedures and also propose methods for each procedure. The topics of this paper include the grasping position detection. We introduce YOLO to correctly detect the portion where should be grasped for stable manipulation. Also, reinforcement learning is applied for a grasping motion acquisition. We introduce Q-learning to obtain a simple and successful manipulation. The effectiveness of the proposed procedure and the methods were proven through experiments using an actual robot.