Garment Manipulation

Getting a robot to flatten, fold, hang, and tidy clothing — the most iconic category of deformable object manipulation.

Garment manipulation covers a robot's handling of clothes, towels, and other fabric items: flattening, folding, hanging, sorting a pile of laundry, even helping a person get dressed. It falls under deformable object manipulation: cloth can deform in essentially unlimited ways and cannot be described by a single pose the way a rigid body can; when balled up, it self-occludes over large areas, making it hard to tell the collar from the sleeves, and physical simulation is also difficult to get right. Because of this, folding clothes has long served as a flagship task for testing a robot's manipulation ability. Physical Intelligence's 2024 π0 paper lists laundry folding as one of its representative tasks; the same year's GarmentLab (NeurIPS 2024) provides a simulation benchmark spanning many garment types and robots, and finds that existing methods still generalize poorly to unseen garments.

ExampleFacing a pile of crumpled T-shirts, the robot picks one up, shakes it out flat, folds it in a fixed sequence of steps, sets it aside, and moves on to the next one.

Also called

Cloth Folding, Laundry Folding, Cloth Manipulation

Related

Deformable Object Manipulation · Cloth Simulation · Bimanual Manipulation · π0 · Long-horizon Task · Household Tasks

Sources

GarmentLab: A Unified Simulation and Benchmark for Garment Manipulation (arXiv 2411.01200)
π0: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Control (arXiv 2410.24164)