In plain words: A robot learns to slide a hanger into flat-laid clothes by splitting the job into steps and practicing in a simulator with 144 garments, using depth images and shape outlines. Trained only in simulation, it hung 8 unseen real garments 75% of the time.
Abstract
For the task of hanging clothes, learning how to insert a hanger into a garment is a crucial step, but has rarely been explored in robotics. In this work, we address the problem of inserting a hanger into various unseen garments that are initially laid flat on a table. This task is challenging due to its long-horizon nature, the high degrees of freedom of the garments and the lack of data. To simplify the learning process, we first propose breaking the task into several subtasks. Then, we formulate each subtask as a policy learning problem and propose a low-dimensional action parameterization. To overcome the challenge of limited data, we build our own simulator and create 144 synthetic clothing assets to effectively collect high-quality training data. Our approach uses single-view depth images and object masks as input, which mitigates the Sim2Real appearance gap and achieves high generalization capabilities for new garments. Extensive experiments in both simulation and reality validate our proposed method. By training on various garments in the simulator, our method achieves a 75\% success rate with 8 different unseen garments in the real world.
Yuxing Chen, Songlin Wei, Bowen Xiao, Jiangran Lyu, Jiayi Chen, Feng Zhu, He Wang
arXiv:2412.01083 · cs.RO · submitted Dec 2, 2024 · updated Jul 4, 2025
abstract · pdf · html · https://pku-epic.github.io/RoboHanger/