Spreading of clothes by robot arms using tracing method

Abstract

The development of robots that can accomplish complicated housework that requires complicated manipulation is difficult and is still in the early stages although urgently required. The chapter focuses on this problem and chose clothes spreading and folding as an example. It proposes a method of clothes spreading using two robot arms with sensors equipped grippers and a fixed charge-coupled device (CCD) camera. This research is focused on getting the robot arms to find and hold two side-by-side corners of a rectangular towel, one by using a simple image processing method and the other by using a unique tracing method. The tracing method is a method of tracing the towel's edge by a robot arm based on the feedbacks from sensors and also images from the CCD camera. By using this method, it was possible to spread a rectangular shaped towel. © 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.