Picking Towels in Point Clouds

Abstract

Picking clothing has always been a great challenge in laundry or textile industry automation, especially when some clothes are of the same colors, material and entangled with each other. In order to solve the problem, we present a grasp pose determination method to pick towels placed in a laundry basket or on a table. In our method, it is not needed to segment towels into independent items and the target towels are not necessarily distinguishable in color. The proposed algorithm firstly segments point clouds into several convex wrinkles, and then selects the appropriate grasp point on the candidate convex wrinkle. Moreover, we plan the grasp orientation with respect to the wrinkle which can effectively reduce the grasp failure caused by the inappropriate grasp direction. We evaluate our method on picking white towels and square towels, respectively, and achieved an average success rate of about 80%.