Kazuhiro Kosuge

Kai Tang, Dipankar Bhattacharya, Hang Xu et al.

Robotic fabric manipulation remains challenging due to fabric deformability and occlusions from wrinkles and the manipulator. This paper defines Random-to-Target Fabric Flattening (RTFF) as the task of bringing a randomly wrinkled fabric to an arbitrary user-specified wrinkle-free target pose. RTFF requires simultaneous flattening and pose alignment, where the two objectives are inherently coupled since flattening the fabric displaces its pose, while realigning it tends to introduce wrinkles. To solve this task, this paper anchors both the current and target fabric states to the same template mesh, enabling direct vertex-level wrinkle and pose assessment without registration. Building on this representation, a hybrid Imitation Learning--Visual Servoing (IL--VS) RTFF policy is proposed. A novel Mesh Action Chunking Transformer (MACT) leverages structured mesh observations to achieve goal-conditioned coarse alignment from a compact demonstration set, after which VS ensures precise convergence to the target. The policy is validated on a real dual-arm teleoperation system, demonstrating precise alignment to unseen target poses, fabric types, and scales. Code and videos: https://kaitang98.github.io/RTFF_Policy/

Yajun Xu, Shogo Arai, Diyi Liu et al.

Instance segmentation is an important pre-processing task in numerous real-world applications, such as robotics, autonomous vehicles, and human-computer interaction. Compared with the rapid development of deep learning for two-dimensional (2D) image tasks, deep learning-based instance segmentation of 3D point cloud still has a lot of room for development. In particular, distinguishing a large number of occluded objects of the same class is a highly challenging problem, which is seen in a robotic bin-picking. In a usual bin-picking scene, many identical objects are stacked together and the model of the objects is known. Thus, the semantic information can be ignored; instead, the focus in the bin-picking is put on the segmentation of instances. Based on this task requirement, we propose a Fast Point Cloud Clustering (FPCC) for instance segmentation of bin-picking scene. FPCC includes a network named FPCC-Net and a fast clustering algorithm. FPCC-net has two subnets, one for inferring the geometric centers for clustering and the other for describing features of each point. FPCC-Net extracts features of each point and infers geometric center points of each instance simultaneously. After that, the proposed clustering algorithm clusters the remaining points to the closest geometric center in feature embedding space. Experiments show that FPCC also surpasses the existing works in bin-picking scenes and is more computationally efficient. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/xyjbaal/FPCC.