High-speed Manipulation of Continuous Spreading and Aligning a Suspended Towel-like Object

Mamoru Oka, Kenichi Murakami, Shouren Huang, Hirofumi Sumi, Masatoshi Ishikawa, Yuji Yamakawa

Abstract: This paper proposes a method for high-speed manipulation of continuous spreading and aligning a suspended towel-like object. Traditionally, manipulation of a towel-like object by robots is difficult and slow, especially in realizing the spreading manipulation because it is difficult to find two proper grasping points. To speed up the spreading manipulation, the state of the corner near the bottom is recognized by ToF (Time of Flight) camera, which leads to generating grasping and spreading manipulation all at once. By conducting a series of experiments on a towel-like object with a randomly suspended state, we confirm that the proposed method enables a high-speed spreading manipulation including the subsequent aligning manipulation compared with previous studies which were performed in the order of minutes.