UnfoldIR: Tactile Robotic Unfolding of Cloth

Robotic unfolding of cloth is challenging due to the wide range of textile materials and their ability to deform in unpre- dictable ways. Previous work has focused almost exclusively on vi- sual feedback to solve this task. We present UnfoldIR (“unfolder”), a dual-arm robotic system relying on infrared (IR) tactile sensing and cloth manipulation heuristics to achieve in-air unfolding of randomly crumpled rectangular textiles by means of edge tracing. The system achieves >85% coverage on multiple textiles of differ- ent sizes and textures. After unfolding, at least three corners are visiblein83.3upto94.7%ofcases.Giventhesestrong“tactile-only” results, we argue that the fusion of both tactile and visual sensing can bring cloth unfolding to a new level of performance.