A Heuristic-Based Approach for Flattening Wrinkled Clothes

In this paper, we present a novel heuristic-based approach to flatten wrinkled garments by means of autonomous robotics. We have designed a heuristic-based strategy to flatten crumpled cloth by eliminating visually detected wrinkles. In order to explore and validate visually guided clothing manipulation, we have developed a hand-eye interactive learning system that incorporates a clothing simulator to close the effector-garment-visual sensing interaction loop. We also propose a criterion to evaluate the various approaches used to flatten cloth. In this paper, our heuristic-based method is applied to virtual cloth in our simulator and the resulting flattening performance is compared to that obtained by manual flattening methods. These experiments demonstrate that the effectiveness and efficiency of our heuristic-based garment flattening methods approach that of manual flattening.