A Constraint-Aware Motion Planning Algorithm for Robotic Folding of Clothes

Abstract

Robotic manipulation of 2D deformable objects is a difficult problem largely because such objects typically have infinite-dimensional configuration spaces and are too computationally expensive to simulate in the inner-loop of a motion planner.The problem we address is as follows: Given a robot model, the shape of a piece of cloth in a spread-out configuration on a horizontal table, and a final folded configuration specified by a sequence of g-folds, output a sequence of robot motions that achieve the final folded configuration or report that none exists, taking into account the kinematics constraints. We make this optimal on execution time.