Fabric Dynamic Motion Modeling and Collision Avoidance with Oriented Bounding Box

Avoiding collision between the fabric and the obstacle is critical to transport fabric piece in the garment factory. If the fabric collides with the sharp-edged obstacle, it can be scratched or contaminated, resulting in poor product quality and increased waste. However, when we consider the fabric model, we find that current fabric models are not accurate enough for this real-world application. It is almost impossible to model the dynamic motion of the fabric with high accuracy, because its motion and deformation are affected by many hard-to-estimate factors. In this paper, instead of using an accurate fabric model, we propose a new fabric motion modeling method using the proposed OBB-Transformer, which models the fabric motion as a time series of oriented bounding boxes (OBBs). Using OBB-Transformer, a dynamic collision avoidance method is designed to plan a robot trajectory connecting the start point and the goal point without collision between the fabric and the obstacle. The performance of the fabric dynamic motion modeling is compared between the proposed and conventional methods. Then, the collision avoidance of a piece of fabric using the proposed method is demonstrated on a real robot system in both 2D and 3D scenarios.