Picking of One Sheet of Cotton Cloth by Rolling up Using Cylindrical Brushes

Abstract

In this paper, we describe a method for automating the process of lifting one sheet of cloth from a stack of cotton sheets. In factory manufacturing of cloth products, many of the procedures for installing fabric parts on machines are still performed manually. In this study, we propose a method that first detects the edge of a sheet of cotton cloth, and then lifts it up by means of a cylindrical brush. Advantages of this method are that it avoids cloth damage, as well as its future potential for enabling dexterous manipulation by means of fine brushes. In verification experiments, the proposed end-effector was attached to the tip of a serial link manipulator. Then a system combining a color camera, a tactile sensor, and a light source was constructed. We evaluate the system and report its performance on a cloth picking task. In addition, we categorized the failure modes of the picking task and devised a vision process for distinguishing between them.