CloSE: A Compact Shape- and Orientation-Agnostic Cloth State Representation
This addresses the challenge of cloth manipulation in robotics by providing a general representation, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing topological methods.
The paper tackles the problem of representing cloth deformation for manipulation by introducing CloSE, a compact and shape-agnostic representation that captures features like corners and folds, and demonstrates its effectiveness in semantic labeling and planning tasks.
Cloth manipulation is a difficult problem mainly because of the non-rigid nature of cloth, which makes a good representation of deformation essential. We present a new representation for the deformation-state of clothes. First, we propose the dGLI disk representation, based on topological indices computed for segments on the edges of the cloth mesh border that are arranged on a circular grid. The heat-map of the dGLI disk uncovers patterns that correspond to features of the cloth state that are consistent for different shapes, sizes of positions of the cloth, like the corners and the fold locations. We then abstract these important features from the dGLI disk onto a circle, calling it the Cloth StatE representation (CloSE). This representation is compact, continuous, and general for different shapes. Finally, we show the strengths of this representation in two relevant applications: semantic labeling and high- and low-level planning. The code, the dataset and the video can be accessed from : https://jaykamat99.github.io/close-representation