ICRA 2024 - Cloth Competition

This year’s Cloth Track of the 9th RGMC focuses on grasp point localisation on hanging cloth items. Teams can build their perception system in the months leading up to the competition, but performance will be evaluated on a dual-arm robot setup live May 13-15 at ICRA 2024 in Yokohama, Japan! You provide the grasp, and we handle the execution on our robots.

We’re thrilled to have 16 dedicated teams registered and actively preparing for the cloth manipulation challenge!

Important links for participants

• 📝 Rules
• 📦 Dataset
• 👩‍💻 Code
• 📅 Competition schedule (coming later)

The Challenge

Regrasping garments in the air is a popular cloth unfolding strategy. To get started, it’s common to grasp the lowest point. However, better grasp points are needed to unfold the garment completely, such as the shoulders of a shirt or the waist of shorts. The objective of the competition is to localise good grasp poses in colour and depth images of garments held in the air by one gripper. We will evaluate your predicted grasp by executing it on a dual UR5e setup live at ICRA. The cloth items that must be grasped will be towels, shirts and shorts. We will provide an image dataset of representative cloth items for preparation, but the evaluation will also include unseen garments.

Practicalities

Participants do not have to worry about the initial lifting of the cloth, grasp execution, camera calibration, etc. We will take care of all that with our open-source codebase airo-mono! At the competition, we will send you an image and you just send us a grasp back in a to-be-specified JSON format. Together with the dataset, we will also provide a Github repository with notebooks and tools to load, visualise and explore the data. Don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions!

Teams

Contact

• Victor-Louis De Gusseme, PhD candidate (victorlouis.degusseme@ugent.be)
• Francis wyffels, PhD, professor Robotics & AI (Francis.wyffels@UGent.be)

Partners