Manipulation

Cloth Manipulation

Cloth manipulation is the robotic handling of fabric and garments, spanning tasks like folding, flattening, unfolding, dressing assistance, and bed making. Cloth is a two-dimensional deformable object with near-infinite configuration space, severe self-occlusion, and complex contact dynamics, defying compact state representations. Research approaches include learned visual dynamics models, dense descriptor correspondence, flinging and other dynamic primitives, and large-scale imitation, with benchmarks such as SoftGym providing standardized evaluation.

Why it matters for physical AI

Laundry folding and dressing are canonical household tasks that expose the gap between rigid-object competence and general manipulation, making cloth a key milestone for generalist home robot policies.