ViTac: Visual-Tactile Synergy for Handling Flexible Materials

处理柔性材料在工业、家庭和零售应用中很常见，例如，评估时尚业的新面料产品，在家里分拣衣服，在服装店补充货架。这类任务高度依赖人力，而且由于柔性材料的复杂动力学，对自主系统仍然具有挑战性。该方案旨在开发一种新的视觉-触觉整合机制，用于估计柔性材料在机械手操作时的动态状态和性能。这项技术有可能彻底改变用于处理柔性材料的自主系统，使其能够在更大的自动化生产过程和过程管理系统中实现自动处理。虽然这项工作中要开发的初始系统是用于处理纺织品，但相同的技术将有可能应用于处理其他柔性材料，包括食品工业中的易碎产品、制造中的柔性物体和医疗保健中的危险材料。

Handling flexible materials is common in industrial, domestic and retail applications, e.g., evaluating new fabric products in the fashion industry, sorting clothes at home and replenishing shelves in a clothing store. Such tasks have been highly dependent on human labour and are still challenging for autonomous systems due to the complex dynamics of flexible materials. This proposal aims to develop a new visuo-tactile integration mechanism for estimating the dynamic states and properties of flexible materials while they are being manipulated by robot hands. This technique offers the potential to revolutionise the autonomous systems for handling flexible materials, allowing inclusion of their automated handling in larger automated production processes and process management systems. While the initial system to be developed in this work is for handling the textiles, the same technology would have the potential to be applied in handling other flexible materials including fragile products in the food industry, flexible objects in manufacturing and hazardous materials in healthcare.