Insights for robotic cloth manipulation: A comprehensive analysis of a competition-winning system

Robotic cloth manipulation will be important for assistive robots. To thoroughly evaluate progress in this field, a Cloth Manipulation and Perception Competition was organised at IROS 2022 and ICRA 2023. In this article, we present the system that won the folding track at IROS 2022 and the folding a...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Victor-Louis De Gusseme, Remko Proesmans, Thomas Lips, Andreas Verleysen, Francis wyffels
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: SAGE Publishing 2025-03-01
Series:International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1177/17298806251322582
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Summary:Robotic cloth manipulation will be important for assistive robots. To thoroughly evaluate progress in this field, a Cloth Manipulation and Perception Competition was organised at IROS 2022 and ICRA 2023. In this article, we present the system that won the folding track at IROS 2022 and the folding and unfolding tracks at ICRA 2023. By combining visual and tactile information with engineered motions, we built a system that can generalise to a range of patterned towels made from various materials, as required for the competition. We describe our system and its limitations, which we relate to future work with the goal of creating systems that can deal with any cloth, robot, or surface.
ISSN:1729-8814