Determining where to grasp cloth using depth information

Abstract

In this paper we address the problem of finding an initial good grasping point for the robotic manipulation of textile objects lying on a flat surface. Given as input a point cloud of the cloth acquired with a 3D camera, we propose choosing as grasping points those that maximize a new measure of wrinkledness, computed from the distribution of normal directions over local neighborhoods. Real grasping experiments using a robotic arm are performed, showing that the proposed measure leads to promising results.