Research on the Form Recognition of Fabric Products: Acquiring the Shapes of Flat, Limp Materials

Abstract

In the apparel, medical and welfare, and nursing care industries, working with cloth items is highly dependent on manual work, so many people have hoped that such work could be automated. However, there are still no established ways for robots to handle cloth. In this paper, a method for acquiring developed shapes is proposed for the purpose of form recognition and classification operations of flat, limp materials. Experiments are performed to acquire developed shapes of materials by actively searching for contours of cloth using a sensor embedded in the finger of a robot.