  While robots present an opportunity to provide physical assistance to older
adults and people with mobility impairments in bed, people frequently rest in
bed with blankets that cover the majority of their body. To provide assistance
for many daily self-care tasks, such as bathing, dressing, or ambulating, a
caregiver must first uncover blankets from part of a person's body. In this
work, we introduce a formulation for robotic bedding manipulation around people
in which a robot uncovers a blanket from a target body part while ensuring the
rest of the human body remains covered. We compare two approaches for
optimizing policies which provide a robot with grasp and release points that
uncover a target part of the body: 1) reinforcement learning and 2)
self-supervised learning with optimization to generate training data. We
trained and conducted evaluations of these policies in physics simulation
environments that consist of a deformable cloth mesh covering a simulated human
lying supine on a bed. In addition, we transfer simulation-trained policies to
a real mobile manipulator and demonstrate that it can uncover a blanket from
target body parts of a manikin lying in bed. Source code is available online.
