  The field of robotics faces inherent challenges in manipulating deformable
objects, particularly in understanding and standardising fabric properties like
elasticity, stiffness, and friction. While the significance of these properties
is evident in the realm of cloth manipulation, accurately categorising and
comprehending them in real-world applications remains elusive. This study sets
out to address two primary objectives: (1) to provide a framework suitable for
robotics applications to characterise cloth objects, and (2) to study how these
properties influence robotic manipulation tasks. Our preliminary results
validate the framework's ability to characterise cloth properties and compare
cloth sets, and reveal the influence that different properties have on the
outcome of five manipulation primitives. We believe that, in general, results
on the manipulation of clothes should be reported along with a better
description of the garments used in the evaluation. This paper proposes a set
of these measures.
