Quantifying the Reality Gap in Robotic Manipulation Tasks
This work assists robotics researchers in selecting appropriate simulators by highlighting discrepancies, but it is incremental as it focuses on benchmarking existing tools.
The study quantified the accuracy of various simulators compared to real-world robotic manipulation tasks, showing relative strengths and weaknesses with concrete data from a Kinova manipulator and motion capture system.
We quantify the accuracy of various simulators compared to a real world robotic reaching and interaction task. Simulators are used in robotics to design solutions for real world hardware without the need for physical access. The `reality gap' prevents solutions developed or learnt in simulation from performing well, or at at all, when transferred to real-world hardware. Making use of a Kinova robotic manipulator and a motion capture system, we record a ground truth enabling comparisons with various simulators, and present quantitative data for various manipulation-oriented robotic tasks. We show the relative strengths and weaknesses of numerous contemporary simulators, highlighting areas of significant discrepancy, and assisting researchers in the field in their selection of appropriate simulators for their use cases. All code and parameter listings are publicly available from: https://bitbucket.csiro.au/scm/~col549/quantifying-the-reality-gap-in-robotic-manipulation-tasks.git .