A robotic skill transfer learning framework of dynamic manipulation for fabric placement

Abstract

Placing fabric poses a challenge to robots since fabric with high dimensional configuration space can deform during manipulation. Existing methods for placing fabric mostly rely on static operations, which are inefficient and require a large workspace. Therefore, this study applies dynamic manipulation (manipulating uncontrollable parts of the fabric by swinging) to fabric placement, proposing a novel learning framework for robotic dynamic fabric placement skill learning and generalization. The proposed framework integrates reinforcement learning with imitation learning, leveraging expert demonstration data to guide and accelerate skill acquisition. Additionally, fabric characteristics are combined with imitation learning to enable the transfer and generalization of the learned policy to real-world environments The experiments suggest that the proposed framework is capable of achieving the placement tasks for a range of positions and fabrics. For success rate, the policy of the proposed framework ultimately achieves a flatness of exceeding 95% and a placement distance error of less than 2 mm. Moreover, the proposed approach is similar in operation time to the fastest method, while it can reduce the space required for manipulating the fabric by over 15%. Compared with other placement policies, it is promising because of its high accuracy, flexibility, efficiency, as well as adaptability.