Fabric Flattening and Alignment System Using Real-Time Mesh-Based State Estimation and Visual Servoing
Published:
E. Lo1, 2, X. Huang1, 3, K. Tang1, 3, A. Seino1, 2, F. Tokuda1, 2,, K. Kosuge1, 2, 3
1. Centre for Transformative Garment Production, Unites 1215 to 1220, 12/F, Building 19W, SPX1, Hong Kong Schience Park, Pak Shek Kok, N. T., Hong Kong SAR
2. Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR
3. Director of the JC STEM Lab of Robotics forSoft Materials, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR
Published in 2025 IEEE International Conference on Mechatronics and Automation (ICMA), (2025)
DOI: 10.1109/ICMA65362.2025.11120640
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- Abstract
- Fabric flattening and alignment are foundational yet challenging operations in automated garment manufacturing. In this paper, we propose a dual-arm manipulator system for flattening a fabric part and aligning it with a desired pose on the flat table using a flinging operation and visual servoing. The dual-arm manipulator holds the fabric part and conducts a flinging operation first to eliminate the wrinkles on the fabric part. After the flinging operation, the dual-arm manipulator pulls the fabric part to align it with the desired pose using visual servoing, while keeping it flat. To achieve this operation, we propose a real-time mesh tracking scheme for the fabric, which consists of a global registration and a fine registration. The global registration registers a canonical mesh to a captured point cloud. The fine registration is based on the As-Rigid-As-Possible (ARAP) deformation framework as a model-free method, which preserves the overall mesh shape while allowing for a fine wrinkle reconstruction. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed system is capable of real-time mesh registration, effective wrinkle elimination via flinging, and precise fabric alignment through visual servoing.