To assist humans during their day-to-day activities and successfully complete domestic chores, robots should be able to effectively manipulate the objects we use every day, including utensils and cleaning equipment. Some objects, however, are difficult to grasp and handle for robotic hands, due to their shape, flexibility, or other characteristics.
These objects include textile-based cloths, which are commonly used by humans to clean surfaces, polish windows, glass or mirrors, and even mop the floors. These are all tasks that could be potentially completed by robots, yet before this can happen robots will need to be able to grab and manipulate cloths.
Researchers at ETH Zurich recently introduced a new computational technique to create visual representations of crumpled cloths, which could in turn help to plan effective strategies for robots to grasp cloths and use them when completing tasks. This technique, introduced in a paper pre-published on arXiv, was found to generalize well across cloths with different physical properties, and of different shapes, sizes and materials.
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