Visual-tactile learning of garment unfolding for robot-assisted dressing
File(s)2023_RAL_v2 (1).pdf (3.79 MB)
Accepted version
Author(s)
Zhang, Fan
Demiris, Yiannis
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Assistive robots have the potential to support disabled and elderly people in daily dressing activities. An intermediate stage of dressing is to manipulate the garment from a crumpled initial state to an unfolded configuration that facilitates robust dressing. Applying quasi-static grasping actions with vision feedback on garment unfolding usually suffers from occluded grasping points. In this work, we propose a dynamic manipulation strategy: tracing the garment edge until the hidden corner is revealed. We introduce a model-based approach, where a deep visual-tactile predictive model iteratively learns to perform servoing from raw sensor data. The predictive model is formalized as Conditional Variational Autoencoder with contrastive optimization, which jointly learns underlying visual-tactile latent representations, a latent garment dynamics model, and future predictions of garment states. Two cost functions are explored: the visual cost, defined by garment corner positions, guarantees the gripper to move towards the corner, while the tactile cost, defined by garment edge poses, prevents the garment from falling from the gripper. The experimental results demonstrate the improvement of our contrastive visual-tactile model predictive control over single sensing modality and baseline model learning techniques. The proposed method enables a robot to unfold back-opening hospital gowns and perform upper-body dressing.
Date Issued
2023-07-17
Date Acceptance
2023-07-10
Citation
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 2023, 8 (9), pp.5512-5519
ISSN
2377-3766
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
Start Page
5512
End Page
5519
Journal / Book Title
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters
Volume
8
Issue
9
Copyright Statement
Copyright © 2023 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.
Identifier
http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/lra.2023.3296371
Publication Status
Published
Date Publish Online
2023-07-17