World representation for a dual-arm robot manipulating with clothes

The work deals with the task of robotic perception/manipulation with soft materials, in particular with clothes and garments. It is part of the diploma thesis project of the first author. The report serves two main purposes. First, it surveys related work. Second, it outlines a subproblem, namely the task how the cloth (garment) should be modeled/represented to enable robotic tasks such as folding the garment, sorting a heap of washes coming out of a dryer. The full scale physical modeling (based on partial differential equations and their finite elements method solutions) is given up because of its complexity. Our approach is based on the assumption that the cloth/garment has natural and relatively stable intermediate states of minimal energy. There are basic action which allow to transfer the cloth from such a stable state to another one. It is also believed that set o basic actions performing such transitions can be designed. The actual proposal of the report is in outlining possible representation of the manipulated cloth.