Items of laundry are fed from an input machine to a mangle or some other laundry-treatment arrangement. Operating personnel are employed to feed the input machine with the items of laundry. This is costly in terms of time and personnel. The invention makes provision for determining surface profiles of the items of laundry by means of imaging installations. From these surface profiles a location for the automatic gripping of the item of laundry or of a corner of same, and preferably also the position of the location or corner, is determined by electronic image processing, whereby the location or corner of the item of laundry can be securely gripped in an automatic and targeted manner. By virtue of the described measures, hitherto manual activities in front of the input machine can be easily performed in a reliable and fully-automatic mode.
