Reactive In-Air Clothing Manipulation with Confidence-Aware Dense Correspondence and Visuotactile Affordance
This work addresses the problem of robotic clothing manipulation for applications like domestic assistance, offering a more generalizable approach compared to prior methods that flatten garments or assume visibility.
The paper tackles the challenge of manipulating crumpled and suspended clothing by introducing a dual-arm visuotactile framework that combines confidence-aware dense visual correspondence and tactile-supervised grasp affordance, achieving task-agnostic performance in folding and hanging tasks with reactive adaptation to perceptual uncertainty.
Manipulating clothing is challenging due to complex configurations, variable material dynamics, and frequent self-occlusion. Prior systems often flatten garments or assume visibility of key features. We present a dual-arm visuotactile framework that combines confidence-aware dense visual correspondence and tactile-supervised grasp affordance to operate directly on crumpled and suspended garments. The correspondence model is trained on a custom, high-fidelity simulated dataset using a distributional loss that captures cloth symmetries and generates correspondence confidence estimates. These estimates guide a reactive state machine that adapts folding strategies based on perceptual uncertainty. In parallel, a visuotactile grasp affordance network, self-supervised using high-resolution tactile feedback, determines which regions are physically graspable. The same tactile classifier is used during execution for real-time grasp validation. By deferring action in low-confidence states, the system handles highly occluded table-top and in-air configurations. We demonstrate our task-agnostic grasp selection module in folding and hanging tasks. Moreover, our dense descriptors provide a reusable intermediate representation for other planning modalities, such as extracting grasp targets from human video demonstrations, paving the way for more generalizable and scalable garment manipulation.