Sim2Real2Sim: Bridging the Gap Between Simulation and Real-World in Flexible Object Manipulation
This work addresses a domain-specific problem in robotics for automating flexible object manipulation, with incremental improvements in simulation-to-real transfer.
The paper tackles the problem of bridging simulation and real-world gaps for flexible object manipulation by proposing a Sim2Real2Sim strategy, which successfully automates the DARPA Robotics Challenge plug task in both simulation and real-world environments.
This paper addresses a new strategy called Simulation-to-Real-to-Simulation (Sim2Real2Sim) to bridge the gap between simulation and real-world, and automate a flexible object manipulation task. This strategy consists of three steps: (1) using the rough environment with the estimated models to develop the methods to complete the manipulation task in the simulation; (2) applying the methods from simulation to real-world and comparing their performance; (3) updating the models and methods in simulation based on the differences between the real world and the simulation. The Plug Task from the 2015 DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals is chosen to evaluate our Sim2Real2Sim strategy. A new identification approach for building the model of the linear flexible objects is derived from real-world to simulation. The automation of the DRC plug task in both simulation and real-world proves the success of the Sim2Real2Sim strategy. Numerical experiments are implemented to validate the simulated model.