Dynamic robotic cloth folding with efficient Koopman operator-based model predictive control

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel Koopman operator-based model predictive control approach for fast and accurate robotic cloth folding, bridging the gap between simulation and real-world application.

Contribution

It proposes a new linear surrogate model for cloth dynamics using Koopman operator regression, enabling efficient trajectory planning for fast robotic folding.

Findings

Koopman-based model allows fast trajectory generation in simulation and real robot.

The approach achieves accurate folding without multiple attempts.

Efficient model predictive control enables rapid folding of unseen poses.

Abstract

Robotic cloth folding is a challenging task, particularly when considering dynamic folding tasks, which aim at folding cloth by fast motions that leverage its dynamics. When subject to such fast motions, the complexity of cloth dynamics hinders both system identification and planning of folding trajectories, resulting in a difficult simulation-to-reality transfer when using physical models of cloth. Compared to the dexterity that humans exhibit when performing folding tasks, robotic approaches usually employ small garments with quite rigid dynamics, and are either too slow, or fast but imprecise, requiring several attempts to achieve a reasonably good fold. In this paper, we tackle these challenges by generating fast folding trajectories with a novel model predictive controller, integrating physics-based simulation of cloth dynamics and efficient, kernel-based Koopman operator regression. Koopman operator regression, an increasingly popular machine learning technique for nonlinear system identification, is used to obtain a linear model for the cloth being folded. Such a surrogate model, trained with data from a high-fidelity, physics-based cloth simulator, can then be employed within a suitable model predictive control algorithm, in place of the costly, nonlinear one, to efficiently generate folding trajectories to be executed by a robotic manipulator. Both in simulated and real-robot experiments, we show how the linearization supplied by the Koopman operator-based model can be employed to efficiently generate fast folding trajectories to unseen poses, without sacrificing folding accuracy.