Simulation

Sim-to-Real Gap

The sim-to-real gap is the discrepancy between a robot's behavior in simulation and on physical hardware, arising from unmodeled dynamics, simplified contact and friction models, actuator nonlinearities, sensing artifacts, latency, and visual differences between rendered and real observations. Policies that exploit simulator quirks often fail outright when transferred. The gap is attacked from both sides: better system identification and rendering narrow it, while domain randomization trains policies to be insensitive to it.

Why it matters for physical AI

Every simulation-trained policy pays this tax at deployment; quantifying and shrinking the gap decides whether cheap simulated experience translates into real-world competence.