Achieving Autonomous Cloth Manipulation with Optimal Control via Differentiable Physics-Aware Regularization and Safety Constraints

Abstract: Cloth manipulation is a category of deformable object manipulation of great interest to the robotics community, from applications of automated laundry-folding and home organizing and cleaning to textiles and flexible manufacturing. Despite the desire for automated cloth manipulation, the thin-shell dynamics and under-actuation nature of cloth present significant challenges for robots to effectively interact with them. Many recent works omit explicit modeling in favor of learning-based methods that may yield control policies directly. However, these methods require large training sets that must be collected and curated. In this regard, we create a framework for differentiable modeling of cloth dynamics leveraging an Extended Position-based Dynamics (XPBD) algorithm. Together with the desired control objective, physics-aware regularization terms are designed for better results, including trajectory smoothness and elastic potential energy. In addition, safety constraints, such as avoiding obstacles, can be specified using signed distance functions (SDFs). We formulate the cloth manipulation task with safety constraints as a constrained optimization problem, which can be effectively solved by mainstream gradient-based optimizers thanks to the end-to-end differentiability of our framework. Finally, we assess the proposed framework for manipulation tasks with various safety thresholds and demonstrate the feasibility of result trajectories on a surgical robot. The effects of the regularization terms are analyzed in an additional ablation study.