  Cloth in the real world is often crumpled, self-occluded, or folded in on
itself such that key regions, such as corners, are not directly graspable,
making manipulation difficult. We propose a system that leverages visual and
tactile perception to unfold the cloth via grasping and sliding on edges. By
doing so, the robot is able to grasp two adjacent corners, enabling subsequent
manipulation tasks like folding or hanging. As components of this system, we
develop tactile perception networks that classify whether an edge is grasped
and estimate the pose of the edge. We use the edge classification network to
supervise a visuotactile edge grasp affordance network that can grasp edges
with a 90% success rate. Once an edge is grasped, we demonstrate that the robot
can slide along the cloth to the adjacent corner using tactile pose
estimation/control in real time. See
http://nehasunil.com/visuotactile/visuotactile.html for videos.
