World Representation of a Dual-Arm Robot Manipulating with Clothes

This master thesis contributes to tasks aiming at perceiving soft objects as textiles or pieces of clothing and manipulating with them using robots. We used a towel and a T-shirt in our experiments. We started from Miller’s (University of California, Berkeley) parameterized model, which represents the piece of clothing. It creates a skeletal model for a given class clothing manually, e.g. for a T-shirt. The approach is suited for spread piece of clothing only. We reimplemented this model based on the original code. We improved Miller’s model. Our version copes with no so well spread piece of clothing. Nevertheless, the improved version does not cope with folded pieces of clothing. The next contribution of this diploma project is the proposal how to represent a piece of clothing using manifold. This extended model should cope with folded pieces of clothing. We did not implement this model, though. We prepared several software interfaces enabling coexistence between different representations of clothing and a particular robotic device. The interface is designed in such a way that one robotic device can be easily replace by another one or augmented by other sensors.