A Simple Gripper Interface for Simulator-Agnostic Cloth Manipulation

2026-09-24

AI Summary

This study addresses the challenges of complex grasping models, reliance on frictional contact, and difficult cross-simulator transfer in cloth manipulation by proposing a simplified position-constraint-based grasping model. By eliminating complex friction modeling, the method defines grasp regions using axis-aligned bounding boxes and pyramidal volumes, achieving simulator-agnostic control through the selection and transmission of cloth vertices. Integrating discrete position constraints, stretch-free simulation, and a projection-based solver, it supports progressive squeezing to smooth motion trajectories. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model exhibits strong robustness across diverse simulation environments and successfully guides a physical robotic manipulator in completing cloth folding tasks.

Abstract

This paper presents a grasping model for cloth manipulation specifically tailored to ease the deployment of robotic control methods. The model is robust, fast and easy to implement avoiding at the same time contact and friction considerations between the gripper and the cloth in favor of simple positional constraints. The gripper is described by its pose, jaw state, and an attached grasping volume. Two kinds of grasping volumes are considered: an axis-aligned box to simulate a pinch grasping and a square pyramidal volume to simulate point grasping. When the gripper closes, the discrete cloth positions lying inside this volume are selected, stored in the local gripper frame, and then transported with the gripper motion. A simple squeezing step is also included to progressively move the selected cloth positions toward the center of the grasping region, avoiding an instantaneous displacement at closure. The model can be used in any simulator as it only requires access to discrete cloth positions and a mechanism for imposing target positions as constraints. We implement our grasping model in conjunction with a constraint-based inextensible cloth simulator, where grasping is implemented as moving positional equality constraints coupled with stretch, shear, collision, and table contact projection steps. The same gripper trajectory is applied on a robot arm to fold a real piece of cloth, serving as a simple bridge between simulation and physical cloth manipulation and showcasing the realism and practicality of our idealized grasping model.

Problem

• cloth manipulation
• gripper interface
• simulator-agnostic
• sim-to-real transfer
• robotic grasping

Innovation

• Cloth Manipulation
• Simulator-Agnostic
• Positional Constraints
• Grasping Volume
• Sim-to-Real