  Robotic manipulation of deformable objects remains a challenging task. One
such task is to iron a piece of cloth autonomously. Given a roughly flattened
cloth, the goal is to have an ironing plan that can iteratively apply a regular
iron to remove all the major wrinkles by a robot. We present a novel solution
to analyze the cloth surface by fusing two surface scan techniques: a curvature
scan and a discontinuity scan. The curvature scan can estimate the height
deviation of the cloth surface, while the discontinuity scan can effectively
detect sharp surface features, such as wrinkles. We use this information to
detect the regions that need to be pulled and extended before ironing, and the
other regions where we want to detect wrinkles and apply ironing to remove the
wrinkles. We demonstrate that our hybrid scan technique is able to capture and
classify wrinkles over the surface robustly. Given detected wrinkles, we enable
a robot to iron them using shape features. Experimental results show that using
our wrinkle analysis algorithm, our robot is able to iron the cloth surface and
effectively remove the wrinkles.

Robotics