Cloth manipulation is common in domestic and service tasks, and most studies
use fixed-base manipulators to manipulate objects whose sizes are relatively
small with respect to the manipulators' workspace, such as towels, shirts, and
rags. In contrast, manipulation of large-scale cloth, such as bed making and
tablecloth spreading, poses additional challenges of reachability and
manipulation control. To address them, this paper presents a novel framework to
spread large-scale cloth, with a single-arm mobile manipulator that can solve
the reachability issue, for an initial feasibility study. On the manipulation
control side, without modeling highly deformable cloth, a vision-based
manipulation control scheme is applied and based on an online-update Jacobian
matrix mapping from selected feature points to the end-effector motion. To
coordinate the control of the manipulator and mobile platform, Behavior Trees
(BTs) are used because of their modularity. Finally, experiments are conducted,
including validation of the model-free manipulation control for cloth spreading
in different conditions and the large-scale cloth spreading framework. The
experimental results demonstrate the large-scale cloth spreading task
feasibility with a single-arm mobile manipulator and the model-free deformation
controller.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figures, submit to CASE202