Upper layer extraction of a folded garment towards unfolding by a robot

Abstract

A layer extraction method aiming at robotic garment unfolding is presented in this paper. Utilizing depth sensor input, the layer detection is achieved through a depth first algorithm and a simple perceptron. An action space based on the edges detected on the garment and their features restricts the complexity of the algorithm and accelerates the detection. This paper constitutes part of the robotic garment unfolding pipeline and emphasizes on the extraction of the upper layer of clothing articles that result in a half folded, two-layer planar state after robotic manipulations. The presented methodology is independent from the type of the handled garment and can cope with unknown designs. First results seem promising and encourage future work on the field.