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Main Authors: Lips, Thomas, De Gusseme, Victor-Louis, wyffels, Francis
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.01734
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author Lips, Thomas
De Gusseme, Victor-Louis
wyffels, Francis
author_facet Lips, Thomas
De Gusseme, Victor-Louis
wyffels, Francis
contents Assistive robots should be able to wash, fold or iron clothes. However, due to the variety, deformability and self-occlusions of clothes, creating robot systems for cloth manipulation is challenging. Synthetic data is a promising direction to improve generalization, but the sim-to-real gap limits its effectiveness. To advance the use of synthetic data for cloth manipulation tasks such as robotic folding, we present a synthetic data pipeline to train keypoint detectors for almost-flattened cloth items. To evaluate its performance, we have also collected a real-world dataset. We train detectors for both T-shirts, towels and shorts and obtain an average precision of 64% and an average keypoint distance of 18 pixels. Fine-tuning on real-world data improves performance to 74% mAP and an average distance of only 9 pixels. Furthermore, we describe failure modes of the keypoint detectors and compare different approaches to obtain cloth meshes and materials. We also quantify the remaining sim-to-real gap and argue that further improvements to the fidelity of cloth assets will be required to further reduce this gap. The code, dataset and trained models are available
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2401_01734
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning Keypoints for Robotic Cloth Manipulation using Synthetic Data
Lips, Thomas
De Gusseme, Victor-Louis
wyffels, Francis
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Assistive robots should be able to wash, fold or iron clothes. However, due to the variety, deformability and self-occlusions of clothes, creating robot systems for cloth manipulation is challenging. Synthetic data is a promising direction to improve generalization, but the sim-to-real gap limits its effectiveness. To advance the use of synthetic data for cloth manipulation tasks such as robotic folding, we present a synthetic data pipeline to train keypoint detectors for almost-flattened cloth items. To evaluate its performance, we have also collected a real-world dataset. We train detectors for both T-shirts, towels and shorts and obtain an average precision of 64% and an average keypoint distance of 18 pixels. Fine-tuning on real-world data improves performance to 74% mAP and an average distance of only 9 pixels. Furthermore, we describe failure modes of the keypoint detectors and compare different approaches to obtain cloth meshes and materials. We also quantify the remaining sim-to-real gap and argue that further improvements to the fidelity of cloth assets will be required to further reduce this gap. The code, dataset and trained models are available
title Learning Keypoints for Robotic Cloth Manipulation using Synthetic Data
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.01734