RaggeDi: Diffusion-Based State Estimation of Disordered Rags, Sheets, Towels and Blankets

Abstract

Cloth state estimation is an important problem in robotics. It is essential for the robot to know the accurate state to manipulate cloth and execute tasks such as robotic dressing, stitching, and covering/uncovering human beings. However, accurately estimating the cloth state remains challenging due to the high flexibility and self-occlusion of cloth. This paper proposes a diffusion model-based pipeline that formulates the cloth state estimation as an image generation problem by representing the cloth state as an RGB image that describes the point-wise translation (translation map) between a predefined flattened mesh and the deformed mesh in a canonical space. Then we train a conditional diffusion-based image generation model to predict the translation map based on an observation. Experiments are conducted in both simulation and the real world to validate the performance of our method. Results indicate that our method outperforms two recent methods in both accuracy and speed. More results and code are available on our project website: https://chirikjianlab.github.io/RaggeDi/