Flexible Object Manipulation

Flexible objects are a challenge to manipulate. Their motions are hard to predict, and the high number of degrees of freedom makes sensing, control, and planning difficult. Additionally, they have more complex friction and contact issues than rigid bodies, and they may stretch and compress. In this thesis, I explore two major types of flexible materials: cloth and string. For rigid bodies, one of the most basic problems in manipulation is the development of immobilizing grasps. The same problem exists for flexible objects. I have shown that a simple polygonal piece of cloth can be fully immobilized by grasping all convex vertices and no more than one third of the concave vertices. I also explored simple manipulation methods that make use of gravity to reduce the number of fingers necessary for grasping. I have built a system for folding a T-shirt using a 4 DOF arm and a fixed-length iron bar which simulates two fingers. The main goal with string manipulation has been to tie knots without the use of any sensing. I have developed single-piece fixtures capable of tying knots in fishing line, solder, and wire, along with a more complex track-based system for autonomously tying a knot in steel wire. I have also developed a series of different fixtures that use compressed air to tie knots in string. Additionally, I have designed four-piece fixtures, which demonstrate a way to fully enclose a knot during the insertion process, while guaranteeing that extraction will always succeed

Robotic Laundry Folding

We designed and implemented laundry-folding strategies for a six-jointed robotic arm. Our two main contributions are a bar-folding method for folding shirts that have already been unwrinkled and positioned on a table, and a planner for generating new sequences of folds that this method can use. Our bar-folding method is quick, accurate, and simple compared to other folding methods, and our fold planner provides an automated alternative to the pre-programmed fold sequences used in other research

Motion planning for cooperative manipulators folding flexible planar objects

Abstract — Research on robotic manipulation has mostly avoided the grasping of highly deformable objects, although they account for a significant portion of everyday grasping tasks. In this paper we address the problem of using cooperative manipulators for folding tasks of cloth-like deformable objects, from a motion planning perspective. We demonstrate that complex deformable object models are unnecessary for robotic applications. Consequently, a simple object model is exploited to create a new algorithm capable of generating collision-free folding motions for two cooperating manipulators. The algorithm encompasses the essential properties of manipulator-independence, parameterized fold quality, and speed. Numerous experiments executed on a real and simulated dual-manipulator robotic torso demonstrates the method’s effectiveness. I

Learning RGB-D descriptors of garment parts for informed robot grasping

Robotic handling of textile objects in household environments is an emerging application that has recently received considerable attention thanks to the development of domestic robots. Most current approaches follow a multiple re-grasp strategy for this purpose, in which clothes are sequentially grasped from different points until one of them yields a desired configuration. In this work we propose a vision-based method, built on the Bag of Visual Words approach, that combines appearance and 3D information to detect parts suitable for grasping in clothes, even when they are highly wrinkled. We also contribute a new, annotated, garment part dataset that can be used for benchmarking classification, part detection, and segmentation algorithms. The dataset is used to evaluate our approach and several state-of-the-art 3D descriptors for the task of garment part detection. Results indicate that appearance is a reliable source of information, but that augmenting it with 3D information can help the method perform better with new clothing items.This research is partially funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under Project PAU+ DPI2011-2751, the EU Project IntellAct FP7-ICT2009-6-269959 and the ERA-Net Chistera Project ViSen PCIN-2013-047. A. Ramisa worked under the JAE-Doc grant from CSIC and FSE.Peer Reviewe

Digital Fabrication Approaches for the Design and Development of Shape-Changing Displays

Interactive shape-changing displays enable dynamic representations of data and information through physically reconfigurable geometry. The actuated physical deformations of these displays can be utilised in a wide range of new application areas, such as dynamic landscape and topographical modelling, architectural design, physical telepresence and object manipulation. Traditionally, shape-changing displays have a high development cost in mechanical complexity, technical skills and time/finances required for fabrication. There is still a limited number of robust shape-changing displays that go beyond one-off prototypes. Specifically, there is limited focus on low-cost/accessible design and development approaches involving digital fabrication (e.g. 3D printing). To address this challenge, this thesis presents accessible digital fabrication approaches that support the development of shape-changing displays with a range of application examples – such as physical terrain modelling and interior design artefacts. Both laser cutting and 3D printing methods have been explored to ensure generalisability and accessibility for a range of potential users. The first design-led content generation explorations show that novice users, from the general public, can successfully design and present their own application ideas using the physical animation features of the display. By engaging with domain experts in designing shape-changing content to represent data specific to their work domains the thesis was able to demonstrate the utility of shape-changing displays beyond novel systems and describe practical use-case scenarios and applications through rapid prototyping methods. This thesis then demonstrates new ways of designing and building shape-changing displays that goes beyond current implementation examples available (e.g. pin arrays and continuous surface shape-changing displays). To achieve this, the thesis demonstrates how laser cutting and 3D printing can be utilised to rapidly fabricate deformable surfaces for shape-changing displays with embedded electronics. This thesis is concluded with a discussion of research implications and future direction for this work

Bimanual Interaction with Clothes. Topology, Geometry, and Policy Representations in Robots

Twardon L. Bimanual Interaction with Clothes. Topology, Geometry, and Policy Representations in Robots. Bielefeld: Universität Bielefeld; 2019.If anthropomorphic robots are to assist people with activities of daily living, they must be able to handle all kinds of everyday objects, including highly deformable ones such as garments. The present thesis begins with a detailed problem analysis of robotic interaction with and perception of clothes. We show that handling items of clothing is very challenging due to their complex dynamics and the vast number of degrees of freedom. As a result of our analysis, we obtain a topological, geometric, and functional description of garments that supports the development of reduced object and task representations. One of the key findings is that the boundary components, which typically correspond with the openings, characterize garments well, both in terms of their topology and their inherent purpose, namely dressing. We present a polygon-based and an interactive method for identifying boundary components using RGB-D vision with application to grasping. Moreover, we propose Active Boundary Component Models (ABCMs), a constraint-based framework for tracking garment openings with point clouds. It is often difficult to maintain an accurate representation of the objects involved in contact-rich interaction tasks such as dressing assistance. Therefore, our policy optimization approach to putting a knit cap on a styrofoam head avoids modeling the details of the garment and its deformations. The experimental results suggest that a heuristic performance measure that takes into account the amount of contact established between the two objects is suitable for the task