Systems and methods for deformable object manipulation using air

A system for manipulating a deformable object, the system comprising:

• a first robot arm having a first gripper;
• a second robot arm having a second gripper;
• a blower robot arm having an air pump;
• at least one image sensor;
• and
• one or more processors programmed to:
• control the first robot arm and the second robot arm to grasp the deformable object using the first gripper and the second gripper, respectively;
• control the blower robot arm to perform a plurality of blowing actions onto the deformable object;
• score individual blowing actions of the plurality of blowing actions using the image data as input into a trained blowing network comprising an image encoder in the form of a convolution neural network and an action encoder in the form of a multilayer perceptron;
• select a selected blowing action having a maximum score among the plurality of blowing actions;
• and
• repeatedly perform the selected blowing action until an objective is satisfied.