Standardization of Cloth Objects and its Relevance in Robotic Manipulation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a framework for characterizing cloth objects in robotics, aiming to improve manipulation by understanding fabric properties like elasticity and friction, and demonstrates its effectiveness through preliminary results.

Contribution

It presents a novel framework for standardizing cloth property characterization and analyzes their impact on robotic manipulation tasks.

Findings

Framework effectively characterizes cloth properties

Different fabric properties influence manipulation outcomes

Proposes measures for reporting garment details

Abstract

The field of robotics faces inherent challenges in manipulating deformable objects, particularly in understanding and standardising fabric properties like elasticity, stiffness, and friction. While the significance of these properties is evident in the realm of cloth manipulation, accurately categorising and comprehending them in real-world applications remains elusive. This study sets out to address two primary objectives: (1) to provide a framework suitable for robotics applications to characterise cloth objects, and (2) to study how these properties influence robotic manipulation tasks. Our preliminary results validate the framework's ability to characterise cloth properties and compare cloth sets, and reveal the influence that different properties have on the outcome of five manipulation primitives. We believe that, in general, results on the manipulation of clothes should be reported along with a better description of the garments used in the evaluation. This paper proposes a set of these measures.