  We have seen much recent progress in rigid object manipulation, but
interaction with deformable objects has notably lagged behind. Due to the large
configuration space of deformable objects, solutions using traditional
modelling approaches require significant engineering work. Perhaps then,
bypassing the need for explicit modelling and instead learning the control in
an end-to-end manner serves as a better approach? Despite the growing interest
in the use of end-to-end robot learning approaches, only a small amount of work
has focused on their applicability to deformable object manipulation. Moreover,
due to the large amount of data needed to learn these end-to-end solutions, an
emerging trend is to learn control policies in simulation and then transfer
them over to the real world. To-date, no work has explored whether it is
possible to learn and transfer deformable object policies. We believe that if
sim-to-real methods are to be employed further, then it should be possible to
learn to interact with a wide variety of objects, and not only rigid objects.
In this work, we use a combination of state-of-the-art deep reinforcement
learning algorithms to solve the problem of manipulating deformable objects
(specifically cloth). We evaluate our approach on three tasks --- folding a
towel up to a mark, folding a face towel diagonally, and draping a piece of
cloth over a hanger. Our agents are fully trained in simulation with domain
randomisation, and then successfully deployed in the real world without having
seen any real deformable objects.
