Study on Handling Clothes. Task Planning of Deformation for Unfolding Laundry.

Abstract

Study on Housekeeping Robot which puts away laundry is promoted in order to improve ability for handling a flexible object. This paper proposes the way of unfolding clothes and obtaining grasping points to generate unfolded state of clothes. There exists dynamical phenomenon that clothes is naturally unfolded by influence of gravity if it is hung up under clothes grasped at two points on its outline. Human skillfully deforms clothes by using this phenomenon as empirical knowledge and this is considered as a useful method to unfold clothes for a robot. At first, condition for determining grasping points to enable to unfold clothes is derived based on the phenomenon. Secondly, the task of deformation of clothes for unfolding including an action for restoring torsion on a sleeve of a shirt is described. Lastly, the validity of the proposed method is shown by experimental results.