Learning Efficient Robotic Garment Manipulation with Standardization

Garment manipulation is a significant challenge for robots due to the complex dynamics and potential self-occlusion of garments. Most existing methods of efficient garment unfolding overlook the crucial role of standardization of flattened garments, which could significantly simplify downstream tasks like folding, ironing, and packing.

This paper presents APS-Net, a novel approach to garment manipulation that combines unfolding and standardization in a unified framework. APS-Net employs a dual-arm, multi-primitive policy with dynamic fling to quickly unfold crumpled garments and with pick-and-place for precise alignment. The purpose of garment standardization during unfolding involves not only maximizing surface coverage but also aligning the garment’s shape and orientation to predefined requirements. To guide the effective robot learning, we introduce a novel factorized reward function for standardization, which incorporates garment coverage (Cov), keypoint distance (KD), and intersection-over-union (IoU) metrics. Additionally, we introduce a spatial action mask and an Action Optimized Module to improve unfolding efficiency by selecting actions and operation points effectively. In simulation, APS-Net outperforms state-of-the-art methods for long-sleeves, achieving 3.9% better coverage ,5.2% higher IoU, and 1.4% higher KD. Real-world folding tasks further demonstrate that standardization simplifies the folding process.